InterestAnchor: Pattern-Based Interest Validation for ADHD Career Decisions

I have adhd which makes me unsure of what i want

I have adhd which makes me unsure of what i want

I've seen this come up a lot and I agree, it's a really common ADHD experience that doesn't get talked about enough. In my experience, the difference between ADHD people who get stuck here and ADHD people who don't usually comes down to which activation conditions are doing the work. Start with some basic activation conditions: \- Novelty \- Challenge \- Intrinsic Meaning \- Social Engagement and Feedback \- Urgency / Crisis \- Complexity \- Interest Most things can hit one or two of these. Honestly, as a young adult novelty is always a common one. The trouble starts when novelty is doing most of the heavy lifting, because novelty has a short shelf life. Once it wears off and the challenge drops as your skill goes up, there's nothing left holding you, so you jump to the next new thing. The ADHD people I've talked to who built careers they actually stayed in usually had something take over before novelty starts to fade. Often it was social engagement and feedback, getting recognized for the skill. Sometimes complexity that didn't run out. Sometimes the work mattered to them in a way they could articulate. So when you say "follow what you enjoy" doesn't work for you, to me that makes a lot of sense. Early enjoyment is mostly novelty firing. It doesn't tell you much about what will hold you later. Try not to worry about it too much. You said "the problem is, that cycle has repeated so many times that now I don't trust my own interests anymore," and I'd push back on that framing a little. Experience isn't a negative thing. It makes you multi-faceted. The caveat is balance. Dropping everything to hyperfocus on a hobby for a month isn't the path to a healthy relationship with your interests. But other than that, do what pulls you. Some people would kill to have things strike their interest the way yours do. Curious people tend to be the ones who find something worth staying with, because they actually went looking. Don't judge yourself for jumping around. The most important thing in my mind is to give your hobbies room to be more than "the next new thing." When something comes along that strikes you deeper than the others, you'll know, because it'll sustain you.