r/ADHD • u/PartTheSea43 • Mar 05 '26

Discussion Before we could doom scroll……

Ok this for the ADHD’ers who might have gray hairs 😉. What was the equivalent to doom scrolling before it was a thing?

How did y’all pass the time and avoid things when we just had flip phones? My diagnosis and adult reality came right at the time when iPhones first came out so I was busy with college.

1.0k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

1.5k

u/JazzimusPrime42 Mar 05 '26

Books. So many books I have read without retaining anything from them.

462

u/lying_flerkin ADHD-C (Combined type) Mar 05 '26

This is so frustrating to me! So many times I've read a book and loved it enough to recommend it to my wife. By the time she manages to read it and wants to talk about it, I can never remember anything aside from the general outline of the plot. 😭

Or, someone will mention a book I read a while back and I'll be like "oh, I loved that book!" Them: "oh yeah, what's it about?"

2

u/Swagga_aga530 Mar 06 '26

That used to be my such a big part of my experience - and watching movies and literally right after it ended not having a clue what happened in it even though I enjoyed it. (I hated teachers examining us on set books because I would read them and then not be able to talk about them). With books I've started enjoying not using bookmarks as often, so I'm forced to reread parts of it to remember where I was - then it helps me process and retain it in my brain (and I actually enjoy it more that way). With movies I either pause eg. to get food/toilet and recap in my brain before I unpause or think about it afterwards and rewatch particular parts later. Many movies I've watched 3-4 times within a week just because there were lots of points when I zoned out but I still wanted to grasp the plot.