So I had a thought about executive function and social repression. Bear with me.

A fairly common problem in people with executive function issues e.g. ADHD is a difficulty in finishing tasks unless they can imagine the final outcome.

In fact most people do better if they can see ahead of time what the final product will look like. That’s why IKEA furniture has a picture of the finished product on the front. But for people with executive function issues this is much more intense.

Check out this whole thread which explains this nicely:

https://twitter.com/sayitslp/status/1187509403630460928?s=21 https://twitter.com/sayitslp/status/1187509403630460928

(Thanks @swardtherapy and @sayitslp )

Many left-wing social theorists have commented on how modern labour is alienating in part because we cannot see the final product of our labour.

Indeed we mostly work now in ways that are not, at least an obvious and immediate, sense aligned with what we are truly interested in. This is obviously a generalisation- but many many jobs are like this.

We either do not get to see the connection to something genuinely interesting to us or we cannot see the real value of the work even if it exists.

This suggests that many of us are, in effect, experiencing some version of this executive function limitation merely because of the type of work that we do.

Moreover it suggests that people with executive function disorders may well have some type of neurological or genetic factor but are also limited by the types of tasks they are being asked to do especially unpaid labour.

This is a bit like saying that lots of modern work is boring, sure, but it’s more complicated than that. What I’m suggesting is that people enjoy, or find satisfying, “work” of a kind where they can see the beneficial satisfying output.

But there is a lot less of this work in our society than is strictly speaking necessary; our particular mode of production is particularly bad at giving us this kind of work. We could do better.

Maybe this is really about ADHD and alienation, or executive function and alienation, rather than social oppression but I think the thought more less holds.