Manufacturing Dissent Since 1996
New interviews throughout the week

Attention Deficit Disorder vs. Capitalism

1024px postcard   struwwelpeter museum   frankfurt am main   dsc03120

At the heart of ADD is a difference in the experience of time. I definitely see this in my husband who experiences time completely different from the way I do since I don't have ADD. For example he cannot get to meetings on time, he is unaware of time passing. For example, if I tell him that it's 2pm, I will be able to tell that time is passing, but my husband can't tell until I fill him in and say that, say, two hours have past and it's now 4pm. Because I can tell time is passing. He doesn't have that sense of time passing. He also has a hard time to conceive of things happening in the past. Everything in the past happened to him basically on "the other day" so it doesn't matter if something happened a year ago or a week ago, to him it happened 'the other day" - he also has a totally different kind of memory. So I am afraid that if we were ever to break up, he would just completely forget about me. So it's just a totally different experience of time. And you can see how that perception and experience of time is completely incompatible with the kind of regimented clock time that capitalist work and capitalism school and so on imposes upon us. The way that we are forced to experience time is that you have set your alarm clock, have to get up at a certain time, have to be at places at certain times, have to fulfill set tasks within a certain time. And you can see that that doesn't work with the way an ADD person's brain is wired.

Independent scholar Laura Basu talks bout her OpenDemocracy article "Attention Deficit Disorder - The Anticapitalist Condition."

Share Tweet Send

 

Img 9322 212x300
Guest

Laura Basu

Laura Basu is a writer and independent scholar affiliated with the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Utrecht University and Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the co-founder of the Amsterdam-based project Good Societies, which aims to develop ideas for new social structures. Since 2019, she has been Europe Editor for openDemocracy’s new economics section, ourEconomy.

Her books Media Amnesia and The Media & Austerity both came out in April 2018.

 

Laura Basu's personal website

 

Related Interviews