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If downers like alcohol bring out the "real you", then uppers like adderall and coke bring out the "fake you". The real you genuinely just wants to laze around and play games, so even if it hurts being a depressive P.o.S., there's always catharsis in the fact you're doing what your brain wants you to do. And if you drank some booze instead of popping an adderall, you'd go, "Work? Who gives a fuck about work! I'm just gonna drink myself into a coma and die in a couple years" etc. Even if it's wrong, that is how you actually feel about things, and adderall doesn't solve that so much as cover it up.
Can you pop adderall every day to stay productive? Sure. Build a career from that if you want. But the underlying problem remains. Stop taking adderall and all the problems come back. So will you take it every day until you retire...? This drug which stifles your creativity, which makes things feel somehow phony?
When we feel extremely sad or whatever, there's a massive wave of catharsis which makes us feel oddly satisfied and complete. And every time a depressed person boots up League of Legends at 2 AM and sips another cup of coffee, there's a mini wave of catharsis. It's his version of what happy people get when they do happy people crap like take a stroll through nature. You take that away from him, and he doesn't really have anything.
If.
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I genuinely feel many different ways at once. I think it's fair to say a part of me wants to simply laze about, while another part wants to work constantly and achieve things. Drugs seem to bring out one side or another, but both sides are equally real, if not equally strong.
If I quit my job and just coasted, the achievement-oriented side of me would get much more insistent on change, and I think I'd start thinking of that side of myself as the "real me."
It does seem to stifle creativity a bit but it doesn't make things feel phony. I still get incredible enjoyment out of my usual pastimes--in fact, I find both videogames and fiction much more enjoyable--but there's less of the creeping dread which fights to keep me from getting started with work.
I didn't think I had ADHD--certainly, I can focus for very long, intense periods of time on things I'm interested in without chemical intervention--but objectively, looking at how my life was going, I think I have a pretty severe case of it. Some of this was biochemical or neurological or whatever you want to call it, and some was due to bad habits compounded over years.
Previously, on a good day I was lucky to get 80 minutes of concentrated work in. The rest of my time was generally split between videogames and mindless doomscrolling, while stressing about all the work not getting done. Now I take 10 mg and get 200 minutes done (more than enough for my job), then spend time afterwards doing things I've wanted to do for ages such as build businesses.
I guess I'm saying--on Adderall, I enjoy the same things in the same way as my "true" self. In fact I enjoy them more. And I have other desires, which I'd argue are just as "true" to the "real me", which are now also being satisfied.
It's impossible to understand people at all without understanding that some of their desires are confused, contradictory, or even actively harmful. We have the power to excise such desires from our personalities with enough work and training. I've discovered in myself a desire along those lines which I didn't know I had--one which seems actively interested, not in basic time-wasting pastimes, but in harming me--and now that I know it exists, I can watch for it and reduce its influence over me.
Doing so is the basis of mortality and possibly the only decision we can make that really means anything.
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