ADHD: Escaping the Model Citizen Trap

For eight years, I lived the life I thought I was supposed to want.

I had finally achieved what so many people spend their twenties chasing. I had a university degree, a full-time position at a mental health agency, good coworkers, benefits, a pension, meaningful work, and a young family. I was using my education, helping people every day, and I genuinely believed that I had finally stepped onto the path that adulthood was supposed to look like.

My son was born in 2002. My daughter followed in 2004. We bought a house. I accepted a promotion into a large primary care pilot project. I enrolled in additional counseling courses because I believed they would help me eventually move my family back home to Nova Scotia. I immersed myself in Tony Robbins’ work because I genuinely believed that success belonged to people who learned better strategies, worked harder, and pushed themselves further.

At no point during those years did I think the system itself might be the problem.

I believed the problem was me.

If I felt exhausted, I needed to become more disciplined.

If I struggled to stay organized, I needed a better system.

If I couldn’t keep up, I needed to work harder.

Like so many people with ADHD, I did not know I had ADHD. I believed I was simply a bright but inconsistent person who had not yet learned how to reach his potential.

Then something happened that I would not understand for another twenty years.

As my children grew and life became more demanding, I began arriving at work already exhausted.

Not emotionally.

Literally.

Getting two young children ready every morning, dropping them off before work, trying to support my wife, maintaining a house, advancing my career, exercising, keeping relationships alive, planning for the future, and somehow still arriving at work ready to perform for another full day gradually became impossible.

The strangest part was that everyone around me seemed to accept this as normal.

Whenever I tried to describe how overwhelming it felt, the response was almost always the same.

“That’s just life.”

“Everyone goes through that.”

“You just have to push through.”

So I did.

For eight years.

From the outside, I had achieved the coveted Monday-to-Friday life that I had believed represented successful adulthood. From the inside, I felt as though I was sprinting a marathon every single day.

I remember one conversation with my supervisor near the end of that period. I had become consistently five to fifteen minutes late for work despite my best efforts to be on time. She called me into her office to discuss the issue. After explaining the attendance policy and the possible consequences, she expected me to promise that I would do better.

Instead, I looked at her and quietly said, “You’re going to have to get ready to apply those consequences.”

She stared at me in complete surprise.

I wasn’t being defiant.

I wasn’t giving up.

I was simply telling the truth.

I was already doing everything I knew how to do.

Looking back now, I realize that this essay is not really about my years at the agency.

It is about something much larger.

Those eight years were my honest attempt to become what I now call the Model Citizen.

I didn’t reject the ideal.

I embraced it completely.

And it nearly broke me.

For many years, I believed that meant I had failed.

Today, I believe it raised a much more important question.

What if the Model Citizen is not simply an ideal?

What if, for some nervous systems, it is a trap?

Every society develops an idea of what a good citizen looks like. There is nothing unusual about that. Human beings have always lived in groups, and every group develops ideals that encourage cooperation and survival. We naturally admire courage, honesty, generosity, competence, and dependability because these qualities help a community function. The existence of shared ideals is not the problem.

The modern world, however, has quietly created something much larger than a simple collection of admirable qualities. It has created what I think of as the Model Citizen. The remarkable thing about the Model Citizen is not that it exists, but that almost nobody notices it. It is never introduced as a formal philosophy or taught as a single lesson. Instead, it gradually settles into our minds through thousands of small experiences. Parents, teachers, employers, television, advertising, schools, friends, and the culture itself all contribute tiny pieces until the picture feels less like an idea and more like reality. Most of us never consciously choose this model. We simply inherit it.

The modern Model Citizen is expected to work full-time, arrive on time, answer emails, maintain a clean home, raise successful children, stay physically healthy, nurture relationships, advance a career, plan for retirement, remain organized, and continue contributing year after year with remarkable consistency. None of these expectations seem unreasonable when viewed individually. It is only when they are gathered together and examined as a whole that their extraordinary weight begins to appear.

For many people, this model fits reasonably well. For others, it becomes an invisible measuring stick against which they judge themselves every day. If you have ADHD, there is a good chance that this experience feels painfully familiar. Many of us spend years believing that the problem is simply a lack of discipline or organization. We buy another planner, read another productivity book, adopt another system, or promise ourselves that next Monday will finally be different. When these efforts fail, we rarely question the model itself. Instead, we question our own character. That is the first part of the trap.

The second part of the trap is even more subtle. The Model Citizen does not simply ask what you are capable of doing. It quietly assumes that you can continue doing it for the rest of your working life. This distinction turns out to be enormously important, particularly for people with ADHD.

Many people with ADHD are capable of extraordinary effort. We can immerse ourselves in new jobs with enthusiasm, learn quickly, solve difficult problems, build strong relationships, and work incredibly hard. Many of us have demonstrated this repeatedly throughout our lives. The difficulty is rarely our ability to perform. The difficulty is sustaining the same pattern of performance, on the same schedule, at roughly the same intensity, five days a week, year after year, for thirty-five or forty years.

The Model Citizen is built upon an assumption of lifelong consistency. It quietly assumes that every nervous system is capable of maintaining approximately the same rhythm over decades. Some people appear to thrive within that structure. Many others do not. People with ADHD often discover this reality earlier than most, not because we are weak or unwilling to work, but because our nervous systems tend to be organized around variability rather than uniformity. Many of us can sprint. What gradually breaks us is being expected to sprint a marathon every weekday for decades.

When this pattern finally begins to fail, the Model Citizen has only one explanation. We must not be trying hard enough. We need another productivity system, another strategy, another planner, another motivational seminar, another promise that tomorrow will be different. The possibility that the standard itself deserves examination rarely enters the conversation. As a result, many people with ADHD carry profound shame. We do not merely feel unsuccessful. We begin to feel that we have failed at being adults.

Looking back, I no longer believe that this shame was an inevitable consequence of having ADHD. I believe much of it came from evaluating myself against a standard that my nervous system was never particularly well suited to satisfy. That realization does not remove responsibility, nor does it erase the mistakes I have made. It simply changes the question I am asking. Instead of asking why I could not become the Model Citizen, I have begun asking what kind of life my nervous system can honestly sustain while still making a meaningful contribution.

That distinction is changing everything.

The goal is not to escape work, responsibility, or contribution. Those were never the problem. The goal is to stop confusing one particular model of adulthood with adulthood itself. There are many ways to contribute to society. There are many ways to build a meaningful life. The modern administrative model is only one of them, even though our culture often treats it as the only respectable path.

I suspect that this realization is particularly important for people with ADHD because many of us have spent decades trying to force ourselves into a life that continually demanded more administration, more consistency, and more sustained executive function than our nervous systems could comfortably provide. We often interpreted the resulting exhaustion as evidence of personal failure when it may have been evidence of a poor fit between ourselves and the model we were trying so desperately to satisfy.

Escaping the Model Citizen Trap does not mean rejecting society. It does not mean rejecting responsibility or expecting the world to reorganize itself around us. It means recognizing that a standard can be both widely accepted and poorly suited to certain nervous systems. It means giving ourselves permission to design lives that allow us to contribute honestly, sustainably, and without constantly waging war against our own minds.

Perhaps that is the real freedom. Not becoming the Model Citizen, but finally understanding that our worth was never meant to depend upon becoming someone we were not. The world does not need another exhausted imitation of an ideal that happens not to fit. It needs people who understand themselves well enough to build lives in which they can contribute for a lifetime—not by pretending to be someone else, but by becoming more fully themselves.

The Tuesday Effect

 

One of the strangest things about being human is that we do not experience reality directly. We experience reality through a filter that I am beginning to think of as normal. At first glance this sounds absurd. Surely we experience reality itself. Surely a person can tell the difference between a good situation and a bad situation, abundance and scarcity, safety and danger, health and dysfunction. Yet the evidence of everyday life suggests something far more complicated. Human beings appear to adapt not merely to what is good or bad, but to what is familiar.

The nervous system seems to ask two different questions simultaneously. The first question is, “Is this good for me?” The second question is, “Is this normal for me?” These are not the same question. In fact, they often point in completely different directions. We like to imagine that people naturally move toward healthier circumstances and away from unhealthy ones, but this is only partly true. People also move toward familiarity, and familiarity often exerts a stronger pull than we realize.

I first began thinking about this while watching The Walking Dead. There is a scene in which Judith, Rick Grimes’ daughter, appears as a child. What struck me was not her toughness, although she was certainly tough. What struck me was her calmness. Judith had been born into a zombie apocalypse. She carried weapons. She understood danger. She was capable of holding adults at gunpoint if necessary. Yet she did all of this with a kind of matter-of-fact confidence. There was no sense that she was living in a world gone mad. To her, this was simply the world.

Objectively speaking, the circumstances were absurd. Humanity had collapsed. Civilization had fallen apart. The dead walked the earth. Yet none of that mattered because Judith had never known anything different. The apocalypse was not a disruption of reality. For Judith, the apocalypse was Tuesday.

This idea may explain why people often struggle to understand one another across generations, cultures, social classes, and personal histories. Each person carries a different version of Tuesday. A person raised in poverty experiences wealth differently than someone born into wealth. A person raised in a loving family experiences relationships differently than someone raised in constant criticism. A person raised in chaos may find calmness strangely uncomfortable. A person raised in calmness may find chaos unbearable. Neither person is reacting to reality alone. Both are reacting to reality filtered through their own version of normal.

One of the most fascinating examples comes from wealth itself. Years ago I saw a video of a wealthy teenager who was devastated because his parents bought him an Audi instead of the BMW he wanted. To an outside observer, this looked ridiculous. Many people would have viewed the Audi as an extraordinary gift. Some people would have viewed either car as unimaginable luxury. Yet the young man’s distress appeared genuine. He was not pretending. He was not acting. His reaction only makes sense when viewed through the lens of Tuesday. He was not comparing himself to the average person. He was comparing himself to his peers and to the expectations of the world he knew. His suffering was being measured against his normal.

This same principle appears in law. When courts consider spousal support following a divorce, they often take into account “the lifestyle to which the parties became accustomed.” At first glance this seems strange. Why not simply provide enough money for food, shelter, and safety? Why should previous luxury matter? Yet society appears to recognize something important here. A dramatic reduction in lifestyle may be experienced as a genuine loss even when basic needs remain comfortably met. This does not mean wealthy people suffer more than poor people. It means human beings evaluate change relative to their baseline. We measure life not only against objective reality but against Tuesday.

Psychology appears to support the same idea. People sometimes leave healthy relationships and return to unhealthy ones. People sabotage opportunities. People who have lived through prolonged criticism become suspicious of praise. People emerging from abusive environments may find kindness uncomfortable. This does not happen because suffering is enjoyable. It happens because suffering can become familiar. The nervous system often trusts what it recognizes more than what it prefers.

This may be one reason positive change can feel surprisingly uncomfortable. We tend to assume that moving toward something better should immediately feel better. Yet that is often not what happens. Sometimes improvement feels threatening. Not because it is harmful, but because it is unfamiliar. The person who receives a promotion may feel anxious. The person entering a healthy relationship may feel unsettled. The person recovering from burnout may feel guilty. The person finally resting may feel lazy. The nervous system keeps searching for Tuesday, and Tuesday is gone.

This idea has profound implications for understanding ourselves. Much of what we call common sense may simply be Tuesday. Much of what we call normal may simply be Tuesday. Much of what we call morality, success, responsibility, adulthood, or productivity may be heavily influenced by Tuesday. This does not mean that all standards are arbitrary. Reality still exists. Human needs still exist. But it does suggest that familiarity exerts a powerful influence over judgment, perhaps more powerful than most of us realize.

It may also explain why cultural assumptions are so difficult to see. Fish do not notice water. Humans do not notice Tuesday. Not until they encounter someone whose Tuesday is completely different. Only then do they begin to realize that what they assumed was reality may simply have been familiarity all along.

Perhaps this is why changing our lives is so difficult. The challenge is rarely changing our ideas. Ideas can change in an afternoon. The challenge is changing Tuesday. The challenge is teaching the nervous system that a different way of living can become familiar. That safety can become familiar. That balance can become familiar. That authenticity can become familiar. That rest can become familiar. That a new life can become familiar.

Perhaps this is why genuine transformation takes time. We are not merely changing our circumstances. We are changing our normal. And normal may be one of the most powerful forces in human life.

Show Your Work: Essays, AI, and the Future of Thinking

 

When artificial intelligence first became widely available to students, many people immediately understood the problem. A student could open a chatbot, type in a prompt, and receive an essay in seconds. Teachers panicked. Students got excited. Parents were confused. Schools began looking for detectors, policies, punishments, and workarounds. It looked, at first, like the essay itself had been broken.

But maybe the arrival of AI did not break the essay. Maybe it exposed how poorly we had been explaining what an essay was for.

Most students experience essays as assignments. They are papers to be written, pages to be filled, arguments to be structured, citations to be included, and deadlines to be survived. In that model, the essay is mainly a product. The student produces it, the teacher grades it, and everyone moves on.

But that was never the deepest purpose of the essay.

An essay is not merely a container for information. It is a tool for thinking.

The word essay comes from the French essayer, meaning to try or to attempt. An essay is an attempt to understand something. It is not simply a report of what the writer already knows. It is a way of discovering what the writer thinks. A good essay begins with a question, a tension, a confusion, an observation, or a theory that is not yet fully clear. The writing process gives that unclear thing a place to unfold.

This matters because human beings have limited working memory. We cannot easily hold a complex idea in our minds all at once, especially if that idea contains several moving parts, examples, objections, definitions, and implications. An essay becomes an external thinking system. It allows the mind to put pieces down, move them around, compare them, organize them, test them, and refine them.

In that sense, writing is not just communication. Writing is cognition.

A person writing an essay is using language as a kind of external processor. Just as a vehicle extends the body’s ability to travel, writing extends the mind’s ability to think. A person sitting silently with a difficult question may reach a limit. But once the question is written down, divided, expanded, challenged, and reorganized, the mind can go farther than it could alone.

This is why some people write essays voluntarily. Strange as that may sound to students who have only experienced essays as homework, many people write essays because they want to understand something more deeply. The essay is not punishment. It is exploration.

Historically, deep thinking has rarely happened in perfect isolation. Many great thinkers developed their ideas through correspondence, dialogue, and intellectual exchange. Charles Darwin wrote letters constantly as he developed and defended his ideas. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung developed, challenged, and eventually strained their relationship through intense correspondence. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien shaped each other’s thinking through conversation and critique. Philosophers, scientists, poets, and political thinkers have often relied on letters, salons, journals, lectures, and conversation to test and refine ideas.

The solitary genius alone in a room is only part of the story. Ideas often grow through exchange.

AI changes the speed and accessibility of that exchange.

Instead of waiting weeks for a letter, a student can now have twenty exchanges in an afternoon. Instead of only thinking alone, a student can ask questions, test a thesis, request counterarguments, explore examples, and clarify confusion in real time. This is new, and it is powerful.

It is also dangerous if misunderstood.

The first and most obvious use of AI is also the weakest educationally. A student receives an assignment, asks AI to write the essay, copies the result, and submits it. This workflow is simple:

Assignment → AI → Essay.

The student may receive a paper, but very little thinking has occurred. The essay has been produced, but the purpose of the essay has been bypassed. The result may be polished. It may even be grammatically correct. But it is often empty in the way people now recognize as AI slop: smooth, generic, competent-looking, and strangely bloodless.

Teachers are not wrong to worry about this. If students use AI only to avoid thinking, then AI becomes a ghostwriter. It replaces the very process the essay was meant to create.

But there is another way to use AI.

Instead of treating AI as a ghostwriter, students can treat it as a thinking partner. Not a real person, of course. AI is not conscious. It does not care, understand, or experience the world the way a human being does. But because it can respond conversationally, it can still serve an important function: it can help a student explore thought.

The better workflow looks something like this:

Question → Conversation → Understanding → Essay.

The student begins not by asking for the final paper, but by talking about the topic. What is confusing? What is interesting? What does the student already think? What does the assignment ask? What seems obvious? What seems wrong? What examples come to mind? What does the student’s own life, class discussion, reading, or curiosity bring to the question?

In this model, the AI does not replace the student’s mind. It gives the student’s mind something to push against.

The student might ask AI to explain the topic, but also to challenge their assumptions. They might propose a thesis and ask what is weak about it. They might ask for examples, counterexamples, analogies, or alternate interpretations. They might admit confusion. They might argue back. They might say, “No, that’s not what I mean,” and then clarify. They might discover that their first idea was too broad, too obvious, or simply wrong.

That process matters.

By the time an essay is finally drafted, the student should understand the topic more deeply than when the conversation began. Ideally, the student has learned something. Not merely gathered information, but changed their understanding.

Only then does it make sense to ask AI for help organizing or drafting the essay.

Even then, the student’s role is not finished. The draft should be reviewed, revised, questioned, and personalized. It should be copied into a document, read later with fresh eyes, and adjusted until the student recognizes it as an honest expression of their own developed understanding.

This is very different from letting AI “write your paper.”

The difference is not whether AI helped produce sentences. The difference is whether the student did the thinking.

This suggests a possible way forward for schools. Instead of relying only on AI detectors, which are imperfect and may punish honest students while missing dishonest ones, teachers could shift toward a “show your work” model.

In math class, students are often required to show the steps that led to an answer. The final answer is not enough because the teacher wants to see whether the student understands the process. Essays could move in a similar direction.

A student might submit three things: the final essay, the AI conversation used to develop it, and a short reflection explaining what changed in their understanding. This would not eliminate cheating entirely, because no system does. But it would shift the focus from “Did AI touch this?” to “Did learning happen?”

That is the real question.

If a student submits a polished essay but cannot show any meaningful process, the teacher has reason to doubt the learning. But if a student submits an essay along with a long, messy, thoughtful conversation full of questions, corrections, revisions, confusion, breakthroughs, and reconsiderations, then the teacher can see something important. The student was thinking.

This approach would also teach students a much more useful lesson about AI. The goal is not to avoid AI forever. That is probably unrealistic. The goal is to learn how to use AI without surrendering the mind to it.

AI is a thinking technology, but the human brain is also a thinking technology. Both have strengths. Both have limits. The human mind brings lived experience, curiosity, values, judgment, emotional context, and personal stakes. AI brings speed, responsiveness, breadth, structure, and endless patience. The best use of AI is not to replace the human mind, but to surround it with tools that amplify its abilities.

A backhoe does not make excavation meaningless. It changes what one person can excavate. A calculator does not make mathematics meaningless. It changes which parts of mathematics require human attention. A word processor does not make writing meaningless. It changes the mechanics of revision. AI, used well, may do something similar for thinking.

But tools only help when we understand what the task is.

If the task is merely to produce a document, then AI can do that very quickly. But if the task is to understand, then AI should be used differently. It should be used to ask better questions, expose weak reasoning, expand perspective, test ideas, organize complexity, and help the student arrive at a clearer view.

The essay, then, does not become obsolete in the age of AI. It may become more important.

Because the real purpose of an essay was never to prove that a student could suffer through five paragraphs without help. The purpose was to help the student think more deeply than they could have thought without the essay.

AI can threaten that purpose.

But it can also serve it.

The difference lies in the process.

A bad use of AI produces a paper without understanding.

A good use of AI produces understanding before the paper.

And in the end, that may be the standard schools should care about most.

Not whether a machine helped with the words.

But whether a human mind became clearer.

 

The People AI Won’t Replace

 

Much of the public conversation about artificial intelligence revolves around a single assumption: thinking is work. Whether people are excited about AI or terrified by it, they often imagine the same future. The machine will write the report, conduct the research, answer the questions, create the presentation, and perhaps eventually make the decisions. Depending on one’s perspective, this future is either a dream or a nightmare, but both sides are focused on the same idea: AI replacing human thought.

There is, however, another possibility that receives far less attention.

What happens when a person who genuinely enjoys thinking gets hold of an AI?

For many people, thinking is a means to an end. They think in order to solve a problem, complete a task, earn a living, or satisfy a requirement. Once the answer is found, the thinking can stop. The goal is efficiency. The ideal outcome is often to arrive at the correct answer as quickly as possible and move on.

But there are other people for whom thinking is not merely a tool. It is a source of enjoyment. They ask questions even when there is no practical reason to do so. They chase ideas that may never become profitable. They read books that nobody assigned, investigate subjects they may never use, and spend hours exploring concepts simply because they find them fascinating. Their minds are restless not because they are forced to think, but because they are drawn to it.

For such people, the arrival of AI may have a very different effect.

A musician does not dream of a world where music becomes unnecessary. A runner does not dream of a future where movement is automated. Likewise, a thinker does not dream of a world where thinking disappears. The pleasure is not merely in possessing the answer. The pleasure is in the exploration itself. The answer is often just the final stop on a journey that was rewarding from the very beginning.

This creates a fundamentally different relationship with artificial intelligence.

Someone who sees thinking primarily as work may ask, “Can AI do this for me?” Someone who loves thinking is more likely to ask, “Can AI help me go further?” The first person seeks replacement. The second seeks amplification.

This distinction may prove more important than many people realize.

Throughout history, thinkers have often been constrained not by a lack of curiosity but by a lack of resources. Exploring an idea might require weeks in a library, access to specialized books, lengthy correspondence with experts, or countless hours spent organizing notes. Much of intellectual life has been consumed by logistics. The desire to learn was often limited by the practical difficulty of pursuing knowledge.

Artificial intelligence changes this equation.

A question that once required days of investigation can now be explored in minutes. Connections between disciplines can be uncovered almost instantly. A thinker can test ideas, challenge assumptions, examine opposing viewpoints, and refine concepts in rapid succession. The machine does not eliminate the thinking. Instead, it removes many of the obstacles surrounding the thinking.

In this sense, AI may function less like a replacement for the mind and more like an intellectual exoskeleton. It extends the reach of human thought. It accelerates exploration. It allows a curious person to travel farther and faster through the landscape of ideas than was previously possible.

The result is often not less thinking but more.

A person who previously explored ten ideas may now explore one hundred. A question that might once have been abandoned due to lack of time can now be pursued. Entire chains of thought that would have remained dormant become accessible. Curiosity compounds upon itself. One answer leads to three new questions, which lead to ten more, and the conversation continues.

Ironically, the people most likely to benefit from AI may not be those seeking to avoid thinking altogether. They may be those who were already thinking constantly.

In fact, AI may reveal something that has been hidden for a long time. Human beings differ not only in intelligence, knowledge, or education, but also in their relationship to thought itself. Some people think because they must. Others think because they cannot help themselves.

For the second group, AI may become one of the most powerful tools ever created.

The future of artificial intelligence is often framed as a story about machines becoming more capable. Yet there may be another story unfolding at the same time. It is the story of what happens when a tireless machine encounters a relentlessly curious mind.

The machine supplies speed, memory, organization, and instant access to information. The human supplies curiosity, judgment, imagination, intuition, and the desire to understand. Neither replaces the other. Instead, they form a partnership.

Most people are asking whether AI will think for us.

A less common question may prove equally important:

What happens when AI meets someone who never wanted to stop thinking in the first place?