Even when I quit beer I managed to make it about other people. Or rather: I took the decision and used other people to make me stick to it. Maybe everyone’s the same?
So my first ironman I did ‘for charity’ - a great way to not back out. I built someone else’s company. When I built my company it was about my family and dreamers in AI. Beer: I was logging on every morning with some profundity I had cooked up through self-observation. Some to-the-bone kind of thing nobody else would say but had secretly thought.
I keep myself on the straight-and-narrow by leading the way for other people.
This site is for me. Or is it? It was started as a way to provide a platform for my family to build effective relationships with me. I maybe misrepresented this by being high-as-fuck and coming across as obnoxious, but this is me writing an instruction manual; it’s a pretty obvious effort from my side. However this feels intrinsically motivated, not extrinsically motivated. That’s new.
This sounds normal but it’s not; I think most people act in-line with other people because of intrinsic motivation or self-interest. They want other people to like them, so they are nice. Extrinsic motivation would be more like needing a stamp of approval for individual actions, I think.
So - I decide I want to instigate some change in my life. Quitting beer might be a little bit too relatable in that most people don’t go it alone, so ironman world champs. I sign up in a self-induced mania and then tell everyone. Personal and professional networks. I make it into my identity. I create a training plan and go on Strava and share every piece of data of every workout and use those ‘kudos’ to hack my dopamine system further.
This is all intentional because I know I won’t stick to the plan otherwise. Or maybe I will, to a point. But the completion - this is what I trained myself to do, by using the fear of disappointing others. Funny thing is nobody gave a shit; it was all internalised extrinsic motivation.
Extrinsic motivation does not need to be external.
We all (?) have internalised versions of our parents and teachers and friends which we are careful not to disappoint. Some people have an internalised ideal like god or a prophet which oversees and polices them, or who they can try to emulate in challenging times.
So we all do this, but I think that people with autism and adhd do it more.
It’s worth remembering that people with adhd have short memories and are easily manipulated, but beyond that, all forms of human relationship are manipulation. If I’m helping you through a hard time, I am manipulating you into feeling better.
Alcohol and drugs are addictive, but not as addictive as people. Make sure you choose the right manipulator. It’s like the tiger in the cage; all you can do it point the cage.
202506260553
So empathy is a visitation as opposed to a meeting. You visit another person’s planet, survey the geology and weather, and try to imagine how certain events might play out in this world.
The problem to date was that I was unaware of how my processing differed; unaware of audhd. I believed that everyone would need to fix a problem before they can process the emotions. Trying to fix other people’s problems was my version of empathising.
Then the flip-side is that people come to me to talk about my emotions and all I want them to do is fix the problem! Cuts both ways.
I think of it like a scatter chart. The closer two people are, the easier to visit and meet. And it’s easier to meet someone in the right mind space if you know where they sit on the chart.
This explains affinity between neurodivergent family members, and why you just get along with some people so much more than others. Relative proximity. But there still has to be an effort from both sides for an effective relationship to be established.
—
So I’m lying there in bed listening to this transformer noise which has bothered my like a truck-sized tooth drill for the last 5 years and… it’s not bothering me. I could sleep through it. This is sensory gating something I have always lacked, apparently.
I had no idea, all this time. I had adhd going wild and had read the book ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’ and boy was I feeling the fear and doing it! But apparently these sensory issues - hearing things that other people can’t to the point of near insanity - apparently they’re not normal.
202506262326
I wonder how many of these patterns we see are real and how many imagined. I guess that’s the difference between genius and insanity, a scientist and a holy man. Though I believe the holy men have more wisdom than the scientists give them credit for. Don’t we have appx twice as many interoceptive nerves as exteroceptive? Yet science is woefully unprepared to describe the subjective experience.
Anyway the holy trinity. Threes. Everything seems to be threes. I wonder what my third mental health disorder might be. Just plain old insanity maybe. Vanilla with sprinkles. Maybe this is all a dream after all. Maybe I’m the only thing being rendered, as 10 year old James would ponder. Am I the tree? And these folks saying they feel like fucking ‘aliens’. What? I have little doubt of my own self, as in senses feeding data to brain; it’s where the data comes from that I doubt ha!
Anyway now I have art, for adhd, knives for asd, and this site for philosophical pontificating. It’s like Facebook without the faces; back when I had 5 friends and they were nice. Those were the days. That’s definitely what Mark had in mind; none of this metaverse shite he’s had to do for money. I reckon he just wanted some friends, and electronic communication was an easier way for him to… wait a minute…
But I never knew this because I had adhd. I was jetting around and thrill seeking. Susan Jeffers had me seeking out that fear and feeling the shit out of it. I was positively hooked on pushing my comfort zone out, methodically, inch by inch, until I was mapping out the back country mountains solo and setting up companies on a whim. Doing dumb shit basically. Putting my life at risk while I have kids to support and when I really don’t want to but god I just can’t not.
Anyway that’s over now. It’s amazing; I still have some drive, sure. More than most. But the crazy days are finished. I’ve been chemically awakened, but I think it’s more than that and the dosing issue merely crammed 6 months of processing into 6 days. So a lot of the changes - especially the ones wrought by the site - should be permanent.
I’ve always liked the ‘you are the sculptor and the clay’ analogy and recent events made the clay of James incredibly malleable. But only for a limited time, as psychedelics have shown me before, so I’m trying to use this time to reprogram myself at a pretty fundamental level.
The plan was to identify the system and its limitations, and then after that to try to build a coherent self. I have all these moral codes and modalities of thought bodged together and the rules - the wool - had become unmanageable. How do you marry a strong moral compass and minimalist mindset with the world of business and consumption? You can’t. So you implode, eventually, at 42. Fucking hitchhiker’s guide there you see; that’s surely a false connection?
Speaking with my wife yesterday she mentioned that I am very introspective while she seems to be more extrospective since becoming an adult; she was introspective as a teen. And I think as kids we tend to have ‘people’ as our own persona. The baby is an extension of mum, and then it inherits parts of dad, and then goes to school.
Over time this person ends up with all these people, and because of regular dopamine signalling, I think their brain is able to extract the salience from their personage. Speculation Lv3 here. I think that most people then - as their brain nears completion in their early 20s - build a real self without even thinking about it. This is why the majority of people look at you like a crazy person when you talk about finding yourself, with the minority nodding in agreement.
Anyway I think dopamine signalling enables the separation of person and value. Eg. Mum = kindness, but kindness =/= mum. I kind of think this happened with me but kind of think it didn’t. I kind of think that my moral code is just a bastardisation of buddhist and christian principles which completely neglects the self.
So I guess these moral codes probably fed into the burnout and breakdown. The unsustainable nature of them; neglecting the self but also their incompatibility with various things we have to do in life.
The language is not suitable, that’s all. J man and b man would have used different words to say ‘be nice to each other’ but if they were here, now, they would probably stress the ‘be nice to yourself, too’ side a little more. Cos fuck me I was not nice to myself, and I don’t wish that level of drive on anybody else.
Anyhow. Curled that one out nicely. Like a Cheeto.
202506270343
Meaning
I’ve always struggled with the meaning of life, or the lack thereof, but maybe that was precisely the point.
Maybe those people saying ‘find your own meaning’ weren’t just throwing out trite soundbites; maybe they had brains which did the heavy lifting for them.
Now… it seems so obvious. This problem I have wrestled with my whole life, and the answer just falls into my lap.
The meaning of life…
… is to find meaning
That’s it. We are human; we find purpose. We find patterns and continuities and convergences. We find God. We find karma. We find rebirth. The theory of relativity. Gravity. Language. It’s all the same. All patterns. All weaves.
It seems so simple. Maybe I’ve read it somewhere before but I just turned my head now and I knew it and that was that. Just like the buddha said that a polished mind reflects reality, so is our purpose in life to cultivate our ability to spot patterns that are true.
And the way that we do this is to improve the accuracy of the sensing equipment through meditation or medication.
This is a meaning to life that I can actually believe based on my life experience.
202506270705
Agency
I do not believe in free will. How can the hand shape itself? I do however believe in probability.
There is a version of agency which neither contradicts the inherent randomness of the universe’s nor the agency we feel in our daily lives.
The tiger is caged.
The handler turns the cage.
The tiger breaks free.
There is a lot more consequence to the randomness in the endocrine system than the quantum randomness of electrons in the brain (I think!). This interplay can conceivably give way to all kinds of situation, but in general it means the nervous system plans and the endocrine system plays.
The handler learns from the behaviour of the tiger and adapts each time. Leaves the keys by the door. Buys apples instead of chocolate. Makes sure there’s no alcohol in the house. Carries a knife for protection. You can see how this could go bad.
This model gives you free will but also accepts the reality that sometimes the fates aren’t aligned; the tiger won’t play ball. All we control is the cage.
202506270728
Nirvana
Another one of those taboo words, despite millions achieving it.
So nirvana means an extinguishing of desire, and of the self. Desire is my focus. Through achieving liberation from desire for material things you attain peace.
The way the buddha taught was to sit and focus on your entire body, for hours on end, practicing equanimity through all physical and mental aches and pains.
The buddha had spent his life doing three years here, five years there and mastering all the regions and meditative practices of his time. Then he decided ‘right’, and sat under a tree until he became enlightened.
I have a feeling that this ‘sitting under a tree’ was a lot more unpleasant than described. Same for the j-man’s visit to the desert. I have a feeling that they were activating their trauma defence mechanism against their entire self.
The way out is through. The way out of suffering is through suffering. You don’t put down the bottle until you’ve had enough.
Maybe these monks sit and flood their bodies with consciousness so they can put themselves in the most exquisite pain, trigger a trauma response, and code themselves to null.
Maybe it’s learned helplessness, gone full circle. Because life is pain, so might as well surrender.
…
I’ll get to brain chemistry later but there will be a specific brain state for each of these experiences and I think it could be mapped and/or replicated.
—
Here we are again at the end of a creative dash, looking up and realising I’ve crossed the finish line and it was all planned from the outset. Somehow I have a new art piece that is about the damage caused by the conflict of asd and adhd, on the very day that I look up and the website (first release) is done.
It always works this way, and you can see how it would be hard not to believe in some divine force. In all likelihood my brain just planned backward from an arbitrary deadline and off I went, none the wiser. But most would see god. Or fate. And I have over the years. And the scientist has gone ‘no James that is illogical’ and I’ve felt chastised.
Today I signed to buy a new house and the guy we are buying off is 80 years old and near fluent in English having sold wood to the UK for his whole life; not a normal thing. One of my ex-colleagues’ partner just happens to be a medical doctor who moved into drug research and marketing; not normal. The convergence of events is sometimes hard to logic-away even for me. There is no possible way that the brain could have arranged these things.
So that leaves fate, coincidence, or some kind of simulation run by a god-like being. But if I look into the new idea of free will…
So we have no free will but we stack the odds in our favour. Would that mean that we have both fate and coincidence? We have the fate in that the asd stacked the odds, and the coincidence in that the adhd played ball.
So we prayed to god - stacked the odds - and then our darker urges just happened to be in a good phase, our plan went well, and we saw god. Or fate. Or 無心. Maybe this is why 無心 is so powerful - the empty mind - maybe this is ‘channelling’ as I call it - where you tap into your pattern-matching handler directly and bypass the tiger.
Anyway I got a bit bored of the audhd stuff. It was getting dry. And it’s just a framework anyway. The boat is just to get to the other side of the river, and an understanding of my life from a spiritual standpoint is the goal. The boat isn’t perfect but it’s good enough. So time to set off, maybe shore up on and island along the way to spruce up the boat with new knowledge, and then on to the other side.
202506271323
—
I was diagnosed adhd and then asd in early 2025 after a lifetime of high achievement and burnout. This is what unpacked from my brain in the month after starting treatment with aripiprazole.
The aim of this was to gain understanding of myself and to create an instruction manual for friends and family, but it has grown. I now think that it needs a total rewrite, because asd and adhd are integral to the human condition; evolution for the meme.
For now though, this will do. The information I have is sketchy and unchecked; I work in broad strokes and approximations. I have pulled together parts of neuroscience, Buddhism and artificial intelligence to create an approximation of my mind.
—
I have come to think of us as having two emotional landscapes which pass a baton between them: the neuronal one and the hormonal one.
The neurones are where asd is at play and the hormones are where adhd lives. Because of intermittent dopamine signalling I think there is an unconscious dropout or ‘blip’ which keeps us in fight or flight.
Because of the skipped beat, the endocrine system stops juicing for a second; the brain carries on. I think this results in pre-conscious lurches of the stomach. Like a sock on a bicycle wheel±
It can also mean that emotions carry over in a strange way; sometimes resonating and amplifying and sometimes dampening and quieting. For example if your electric-emotion is + and juice emotion is + then you can end up too amped up, or if your electric emotion is + and juice emotion is - then you can end up looking at your dream life and wondering why you feel so bad.
This is part of evolution though; it’s what keeps us dancing unpredictably instead of just rubbing sticks together in caves.
It can be unpleasant for the individual in the moment, but we all have random emotions, just adhd cranks them up a little. Drugs crank them down.
—
Given memory and data limitations my brain needed to figure out a workaround. Running single threads to completions seems to be it.
I will take a single piece of data and wrangle it like a generative AI.
I will hypothesise all the way to God before reeling it back in to something more realistic and stepping to the next stage. It’s like I run all the way to the z, where someone else would have seen they can stop at d.
This means I’m annoyingly fast for simple tasks but annoyingly slow for complex tasks: conversation about emotion, which has a lot of internal feedback as well as external, for example. It means I’m good in a crisis. It means I overthink.
The low memory also means that I struggle to get things through the logjam and into or out of processing. I need to export data (think aloud, write it down) to effectively bypass this memory limitation and add more threads to the process.
My brain will optimise every process as much as possible. Things are fast and to the point, because they have to be. It’s a system limitation, and if they aren’t fast and to the point then I am unable to function.
Processing is always sequential because of time blindness; everything slots together like lego blocks.
Output also struggles because of memory limitations. I can be thought of as a dot matrix printer attached to a supercomputer. I often don’t see the full picture of what I’m saying unless I’m allowed to infodump to completion,.
Logic is simple and processed before emotion, which is complex and painful. This is also not a choice. When emotion is processed, it’s usually processed solo. Sometimes it’s not processed at all.
20250628
Threads are full processes in my mind, and tracks are the individual steps in a process. A thread is A->Z and a piece of track is A->B.
My train is short and fast but can only handle 3 pieces of track. I pick up the last piece to put down the next and if someone comes in with a tangential comment it can derail the whole thing.
This speed and memory limitation is why I infodump: I need to keep going fast to hold my overall target in mind and paint, but in doing so I risk losing the track I’m laying.
This can make me very easy to distract, in which case I will get flustered easily since I was already near memory overload, and it also makes me easy to manipulate if you know my prompts.
You can easily manipulate me back onto the track if I lose my way; just give me the last 2-3 things I said.
Since I am able to long-term pause a thread, what I will sometimes do is start multiple conversations before I forget the topic, then come back to them later after high-priority tasks are done.
This is also why I should never re-read texts from difficult times. Emotional decoupling is slow.
202506
This final wrapping up phase. Always a chore. Picking up those final little scraps. Crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s. I guess it would make sense that I find it harder than most, ha! Crazy on the crazy and crazy on the order.
But yeah this is how I’ve always worked. Make a mess, clean it up. 2 weeks of insanity, then turning around exhausted and realising that it’s all done, an hour before the deadline.
But this last little bit where you’re brushing it up. Maybe it’s the fact that you’re doing it for someone else. Making the website, and making most of my art, is for me. But then finishing it off; that last little bit… that’s for someone else. And I seem to have a pretty strong aversion to doing things for other people lately.
To clarify: soto people. I’m so happy I made that philosophy to fall back on, already. Autistic, you see. Rules. Written by myself. Adhd you see.
Yeah that’s why my job was so draining: I was only half masked to everyone all the time. So I was what… looking for friends while they were looking for jobs? But at the same time it was just my rsd doing that so I’d hate it while being unable to stop. Best in Tokyo at that job. A loud pattern matching machine, relatable to the AI industry. Makes sense now.
It really was draining though. Why do I do it? Why do I work so hard to please other people? And thinking about it, it’s not usually the real people, but the internalised ideals. I guess this is because those internalised ideals are such harsher critics than the real people. The real people wouldn’t need such appeasing, but the internal ones do.
So I’m on the other side of the world making gifts, and just feeling… weird when I see them being opened? It’s almost like the idea of making the gift was more important than the giving. Again - the chase, I guess. Dopamine, I guess. Everyone’s not like this, I guess.
The knives are for me.
I might choose to sell them but they’re for me. The knives are nurturing and feeding and putting things in. The art is explosion and expression and getting things out. The knives are selecting what you want to allow through your defences and the art is expunging things you can’t bear to keep in.
This site was quite the project though. And somehow about 2 weeks ago I just got the drive to start that art piece I’d had in mind, and they both finish on roughly the same day. But they don’t feel like they’re ‘for’ someone else. They’re not a visitation. This site and the art are a meeting. An invitation.
Or rather, the site is a map, because I don’t think my planet is particularly open for visitation. Not right now at least; I’ve just finished the logical processing so we know what comes next.
Just a couple last articles to look over before I can get to it though. No loose threads. But god damn this ‘solution’ page is soul sucking for me. I did these things and I never want to do them again but I know they can help some people so c’mon James use the power of the drugs to do it.
[bravestarr voice] motivation of aripirprazooooole
202506280420So one of the things about processing logic first is that you are very good in a crisis. While everyone else loses their heads, you instinctively solve the problem. It’s not even a choice; it’s how your brain formed.
So this is great when the house is actually burning down. In times of war, times of strife, people come back to the divergent thinkers. Then in times of peace, they want convergence. There is no solving the problem of emotions; a fact my brain will never accept.
I’ll not be any good at sitting down and talking through what happened, but when it comes to actually getting through the crisis in one piece, I’m your man.
0544
What is the self in the technology analogy?
The AI is trained and you know the input but there could be any infinite number of variables in the processing to make any given output.
That black-box processing will be the ‘me’.
Even with the same input same output, it could be anything.
Someone doing charity could be doing it through goodwill or through guilt and you would never know because that’s all in the blackbox.
The extrapolation I did using the in/out data will be best-guess based on the information available to me from various walks of life.
But what is the AI? What is the self? The deep learning algorithm that was set loose on seemingly random data and told ‘learn’, and ‘reproduce’?
I suppose this is the 道 again. You try to refine your process so much that your AI is refined, clean, straight from A to B with no faffing about and no extraneous processing.
And then you achieve a kind of ease or a grace, because instead of 20 steps you only take 2.
You reflect reality perfectly, like the buddha said. Every moment is flow state.
0853
relief
With all that’s happened it’s easy to forget that aripiprazole was prescribed for autistic sensitivities. There’s a transformer noise which comes through our wall and feels like a drill in my skull; nobody else can hear it. Now.. it doesn’t bother me. I can hear it but not fixate like I used to.
The biggest initial one was this waves of adrenaline though. I don’t know if my adhd got worse with age but it definitely felt that way, and if it is indeed leaky synapses you might expect it to worsen as someone gets older. It was like being on a rollercoaster while sat in my living room.
I don’t really want to dwell on the beforetimes much; I feel like I’ve exported them all nicely now. But they will be forgotten so easily.
My head is so much clearer. I never even realised it was full of bees but honestly I don’t know how I even managed RedBook4 never mind LOTR. Focusing (not hyperfocusing) was so hard, and the voices of my kids; I could feel myself scowling just because of sensory issues. That’s not the kind of father I want to be.
If I’m honest, not having to communicate with so many people is a huge relief. The international communication by text, which is either down-your-throat-now or wait-12-hours-maybe. Probably cuts both ways.
More than anything… the internal relief.
I know I’m autistic and have adhd and I can accept myself. I can finally accept who I am, and my flaws and strengths. This was the missing piece without which all the others could not fall into place. This was the unifying theory for my universe; my good and evil.
I know I can stop beating myself up about internal conflict. I know the conflict won’t stop.
I also know that I can tell people to leave me alone because I’m autistic. And here’s the kicker:
Because I don’t have rsd any more I can actually ask them to do so. I no longer feel like missing one visit to the park with my children will somehow be the end of the world. And through having a little less quantity of contact, and a few milligrams of something in my system, I’m able to be a better father, making them happier people, and so on. It’s good karma in a pill.
The drive is lessened. I still can’t sit still and never will be able to but the drive is more academic than accelerant now. I can choose to not engage. The initial invincibility from aripiprazole is gone but task initiation and switching require a lot less ‘oomph’ and ..
The sleep. Oh my god the sleep.
I have always been a terrible sleeper; aren’t we all. Well guanfacine gave me better sleep than any sleeping med or behavioural thing I’d ever tried and then aripiprazole… wow. Just wow. I lie down at 9 now and I’m asleep in 5 minutes. I wake up with the sun, fresh. I can choose to get up or sleep more where previously I didn’t have much agency. First couple of weeks were weird but then; life changing.
That’s it; Abilify.
Actually a great brand name despite the terrible generic name. It has given me so much agency in my life. It has given my wires control over my juices, and it has done it 24/7 so. I think that my memories are resequencing while I sleep; every day I am hit with memories that I thought were gone forever.
Basically I feel fixed. I’m sure it’ll pass and I’ll feel shit again sooner or later. But honestly - for everything that ailed me - I feel fixed. Forgetfulness and distractibility have always been manageable irritations, with emotional regulation and impulsivity being my main problems. Guanfacine does the regulation and aripipazole does both.
But yeah my world is quieter and lighter. My mind is quieter and lighter. My heart is quieter and lighter. Everything is easier and has more meaning. I am a little more at peace with the emptiness of it all.
202506290408
So what exactly is mania? I’ve jetted all over the world, set up companies, hoo rah signed up for ironman races, bombed tree runs, jumped out of aeroplanes… you get the idea.
I expect these could all have been categorised as mania. But I was in control, mostly, so were they? Is mania not categorised by a lack of control? Or a detachment from reality?
So I get fired up - very fired up - and tend to lead from the vanguard. People follow me and improve their life situations as a result. Biologically I definitely push myself into ‘hypomania’ all the time. My goals are very unrealistic. My motto is ‘aim high miss high’. Definitely manic for the people from my town.
Full on mania would be when you lose contact with reality and I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced that. I do however think that some degree of hypomania has been a feature in my life and will remain so. I don’t think it’s a problem; it’s just me ‘getting fired up’. It’s why I do shit instead of watch Eastenders.
The time when I do tend to edge toward hypomania is when people ignore me. I’m not sure why this is and it warrants more thought. There must be a biological reason why people with adhd and asd get so irate at being ignored. I’m guessing it’s something to do with asd monotropic thinking, impulsiveness and rsd.
Anyway the recent dosing issue was a drug pushing up dopamine and serotonin so the juices were out of whack but the wires were fine. Maybe mania is when the craziness clicks over to the wires?
I would say I nudged into hypomania, because of being ignored on the science, but I still didn’t quite get there. This was still ‘normal’ territory for me. I could feel the goal directed, pressured speech, not needing rest behaviour coming but that’s normal for me when I’m in an active phase, and I think it’s the adhd and asd playing into each other, not a form of bipolar (though I’ve not ruled it out).
I honestly don’t know. As said, mucky waters. When I went ‘fuck it’ and proposed/ built a company/ signed up for a race… biologically, on the juices front, this was hypomania. But on the electricity front I was in perfect control.
Maybe that’s the difference. In which case I don’t think I’ve ever experienced mania. I have experienced acute frustration, but that’s acute and different. I experience frustration very quickly when someone ignores me, and that was likely amplified by the recent dosing issue.
… and I still think the science is right…
0555