When your mind cannot stop generating realities, at some point you start to feel miserable. It is not that you cannot work. It is that the part of the mind that should sort, prioritize, and commit never really switches on.
What this feels like
ADHD gets used as a catch-all, but not every neurodivergent tendency fits the same box. Divergent thinking, or ideation as some call it, can look a lot like hypomania. In fact, hypomania and mania often co-occur with extreme ideation, racing thoughts, and other similar symptoms.
The stream of novelty can be wonderful when you are sitting with your team, thinking about a design or a marketing strategy. But when it is time to sit down and implement, the same tendency becomes a barrier. A reward system optimized for exploration finds rote knowledge work deeply irritating.
The trap
As I was writing this post, I had already surfaced another idea from the psychology literature that could help me retain meaning when reading text. That is exactly the problem I am describing here. The mind keeps producing new doors before you have finished walking through the current one.
People with this kind of mind usually split into two groups. Some have enough industriousness to materialize their ideas. Others daydream all day.
For a long time I was in the second group. I still got good results in life overall, but I underachieved relative to what I knew I could do. I craved novelty too much. Tipping into distant realms has its charms and benefits, but if it stays unchecked it can ruin your life. It can make you into the kind of generalist who was supposed to win but did not.
The upside
There is still value in this cognitive style. You can talk to people from different specialties without the deer-in-the-headlights stare. You can connect fields that normally do not speak to each other. That has real value in science and engineering.
The problem is that creativity alone does not guarantee output. Without some way to direct it, divergent thinking turns into a form of internal motion with no destination.
The real issue
In my view, this cognitive phenotype benefits a lot from proper market positioning. Divergent thinkers are often separated by how industrious they are, but the degree to which they can leverage creativity depends heavily on whether they are in the right place in a company or organization.
The curse is not creativity itself. The curse is having enough of it to see many possible worlds, but not enough structure to live inside one.