Comment by jijijijij

4 months ago

> If being organized makes you feel good

> If you are very OCD

Please educate yourself, OCD is serious shit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsessive%E2%80%93compulsive_d...

Some people with OCD literally starve to death, because they can't leave their house. Commonly you find those affected washing their hands repeatedly until they bleed... and then some more. It is absolute not a "what makes you feel good" kinda thing, it's a dysfunctional and irrational mental world model enforced by a crippling sense of doom, anxiety and shame, which will consume life (especially if "very OCD").

Most importantly, for those with actual OCD, you absolutely aren't advised to embrace that destructive, irrational world model by leaning in on compulsions. You cannot really exploit it for good, by definition. And by definition, it isn't benign.

I wish people would stop attributing a quirky/controlling personality, a desire for order, symmetry and tidy rooms to a serious mental disorder. You wouldn't twist major depression, schizophrenia, or cluster B disorders like that. If you feel left out on the identity game, go read Lord of the Rings, or Das Kapital, try horse riding, or golf.

Quite honestly, for me this casts serious shade on the whole article. Because "ADHD" is similarly misattributed and casually "self-diagnosed". Maybe the author just got very ADHD by browsing too much Insta and later found stimulants to be stimulating. Much easier to cure that kind of ADHD through abstinence and structure. (Although coming up with elaborate routines and revolutionary hacks, which are a total breakthrough for a whole month, is a very ADHD thing...)

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jijijijij

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allworms  4 months ago

> I wish people would stop attributing a quirky/controlling personality

> for me this casts serious shade on the whole article

I think that's healthy wariness. The article seems overall well thought out, but OCD is an extremely common blindspot today, so I don't think it spoils the rest of the advice (which is largely good and spot-on).

Even my primary care doctor, when I told him I'd been diagnosed with OCD causing many disparate kinds of anxiety and depression, said something about "well you want your accountant to have a little OCD for example." I was a little stunned!

  • jijijijij  4 months ago

    I agree, there is some good advice in there. However, this makes the OCD remark stand out even more for me. Bit like a doctor recommending homeopathy or starts talking about flat earth stuff. Getting such a basic thing so wrong, taints everything else.

    See, "the good advice" is knowledge I can recognize as such, therefore information I already have. You need a basis of trust accepting any new information. A flat-earther may get Newtonian physics right, but I won't go there to learn about it.

    I don't think the OCD section adds much anyway, so I think the article would be greatly improved by removing it.

hinkley  4 months ago

I would say that control issues are the seed of OCD. Nobody wants OCD, but Illusion of Control is no cakewalk either. Generally that will also go along with an anxious or avoidant attachment style, which is even less fun.

  • jijijijij  4 months ago

    I don't get your point, sorry. Not sure you got mine, either.

    As mentioned in a comment elsewhere, the article has changed since I wrote the call out. It doesn't contain the ignorant OCD remark anymore. I didn't bring up OCD out of nowhere.

    • hinkley  4 months ago

      Probably too much assumed context. I’ll expand.

      A good deal of ADHD masking/coping mechanisms show up as trying to control certain parts of the environment. We need to do this thing that way and keep this thing at that location and never ever do X but instead Y.

      It can look like someone who needs those things for other reasons, like mild OCD or even autism. But it’s really about preventing everything from going to shit in the worst ways that we cannot deal well with.

      So while your room may look like a bomb went off and your fridge is half empty, there are certain things you are super precious about. Because a little work now saves a lot of grief later, and for those little islands of sanity you find the motivation to perform them.

      For me this is mostly at work. And the things I need to be a certain way help everyone during an emergency. High cortisol levels make every brain more like an ADHD brain.

      1 reply →

margor  4 months ago

Do you really believe there is only one kind of OCD, specifically one you described?

I'm sorry to tell you, but both ADHD and OCD exist on a spectrum. Furthermore, ADHD like symptoms can be caused through other illness than actual dopamine deficiency.

  • allworms  4 months ago

    There are many kinds of OCD! There are zero kinds of OCD that aren't a disorder. A helpful mnemonic is: you could imagine OCD stands for "obsessive compulsive disorder".