Somewhere this week, a headteacher will look at their staffing data and feel relief. Nobody’s handed in their notice. The timetable is covered. They’ll call it stability.

It isn’t stability. It’s paralysis.

England has among the worst teacher attrition rates of any developed nation. Nearly a third leave within their first five years. The unfilled vacancy rate is six times higher than pre-pandemic. Schools are spending over £1 billion a year on supply teachers just to keep classrooms covered.

Retention in recent cohorts has ticked up. Fewer teachers are actively leaving. On the surface, it looks like progress.

ADHD.

Diagnosed at forty-five, sitting across from a doctor of psychology, watching my whole life reorganise itself around a word nobody handed me when it would have changed everything.

I called it hitting every branch on the way up.

The hard way. The messy way. The dramatic way. Public, and humiliating, and lonely inside the performance.

And I want to talk about the thing nearly everyone gets wrong about a kid like that.

They already know they’re getting it wrong. There’s a scoreboard running inside them that never switches off, and it’s more brutal than anything you’d ever say out loud.

So when you point out the thing they missed, you’re not giving them support.

You’re giving them evidence.

This one’s written for two people. The kid I was. And the kid you’re losing your patience with right now.

They’re closer to the same person than you think.

Let’s get into it.

The podcast for people who look like they’re coping.

The people who get shit done.

The people everyone relies on.

The people carrying far more than anybody realises.

Every week, we take apart the things we don’t talk about.

The invisible load.

The stories we tell ourselves to keep going.

The patterns running underneath the version of us we hand to everyone else.

Because most people who need this conversation won’t say they need it.

In fact, they’ll probably tell you they’re fine.

So I’m going to say it for them.

You’re not fucking fine.

And let’s talk about it.

This is the full spoken essay on why resistance to AI isn't a considered position, it's a measurable foraging behaviour, and why the neurodivergent brain felt the shift first.

It starts with the death of my dog, Ripley, and the moment a thing becomes irreversible. The drug is in the bloodstream and from there, there is only the ride. I had the same feeling the first time I properly used AI. Not happening. Happened. The whole argument lives in that change of tense.

A 2023 study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B gave people a foraging task: find the resource, decide when to move on. The people with neurodivergent traits abandoned the depleted patch faster and collected more overall. The rest stayed, harvesting ground that had already thinned, because familiar felt safer than uncertain. Your resistance to AI isn't a position. It's a foraging strategy with a neurological signature.

From there it gets into the patterns nobody wants to look at. The printing press. Calculators. Smartphones. Every threshold, the same contraction, the same moral language, and not once did the panic stop the crossing. It pulls in loss aversion (Kahneman and Tversky), status quo bias (Samuelson and Zeckhauser), the sentinel hypothesis, the WEF Future of Jobs report, and the uncomfortable overlap between the traits that got pathologised for a century and the traits the new economy now pays the most for.

I was diagnosed neurodivergent in my mid forties, after four decades of masking so well the cost was invisible to everyone, including me. The tool was never fixing the brain. The brain was never broken. The tool fixes the environment.

It also takes the strongest objections seriously: consent, scraped work, labour displacement, the concentration of power. Two things can be true at once, and holding them without flattening them is the whole point.

Read the full written essay, with the images, on Substack. The complete breakdown of the prompt stacks, chains and AI tools used to make it is there for paid subscribers.

READ THE FULL ESSAY (with images):

https://open.substack.com/pub/eddjervis/p/you-hate-ai-good-that-makes-you-the?r=5q9l9m&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer

SUBSCRIBE to You're Not F*cking Fine:

https://eddjervis.substack.com

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CHAPTERS:

00:00 I used AI to write this

00:00 The death of my dog, and the moment it became irreversible

00:00 AI is not happening, it has happened

00:00 The foraging study: why some brains move and some stay

00:00 The pattern: printing press, calculators, smartphones

00:00 Loss aversion and status quo bias

00:00 The sentinel hypothesis and the neurodivergent scout

00:00 Why pathologised traits are now the most valuable

00:00 The strongest objections to AI, taken seriously

00:00 When the resource moves, the scanners know first

If you've already moved, you already know. Tell me in the comments what patch you finally walked away from.

#Neurodivergence #ADHD #ArtificialIntelligence #FutureOfWork #Substack