The Neurodivergent World: How We Cope, Who Profits, and Why Nothing Changes (Part 3 of 4).
Why Your Postcode Determines If You're "Genius" or "Unemployable" (And How Cartels, Drinks Companies, and the NHS All Profit From Your Brain Being Different).
How the same ADHD brain becomes Steve Jobs with money or gets you sacked by the JobCentre without it - plus why we self-medicate, who profits from our desperation, and what people still wearing masks five years after COVID reveal about threat processing.
The Story So Far.
In Parts 1 and 2, we exposed the people and systems - politicians whose brains are wired for power without empathy, institutions designed to exploit rather than accommodate different brains. Now for the hardest part: understanding we’ve always been this way, and what we do to cope.
Same Label, Different Ingredients: Why Your Postcode Determines Your Diagnosis.
The label will always stay the same. It’s just the ingredients inside our heads that either make us the recipe for success or disaster in life. That’s all it is. Same label, different ingredients, and depending on how they’re mixed, you either end up running a company or sleeping rough under a bridge.
You’ve got the same base components - a brain that works differently - but mix in a bit of wealth, some family connections, the right postcode, a decent education, and suddenly your neurodivergency is “visionary thinking” or “attention to detail” or “creative genius.” You’re Steve Jobs. You’re Richard Branson. You’re that eccentric billionaire everyone wants to have lunch with.
But take those exact same ingredients - the obsessive thinking, the social difficulties, the inability to function in conventional structures - and remove the money, the support system, the safety net, and now you’re “unemployable.” You’re “difficult.” You’re the bloke the JobCentre can’t place because you can’t make eye contact in interviews. Same brain, same wiring, different circumstances, completely different outcome.
It’s not the neurodivergency that determines whether you’re a success or a disaster. It’s everything around it. It’s whether you were born into a family that could afford to call your quirks “gifted” instead of “problem child.” It’s whether you had teachers who saw potential instead of disruption. It’s whether you could afford to fail a few times before you figured it out, or whether one failure meant you were done.
The recipe’s the same. The ingredients are the same. It’s just that some of us got to cook in a fully-equipped kitchen with a safety net underneath, and the rest of us got a camping stove and a prayer. And then society looks at the ones who fell and asks, “What’s wrong with you?” when the real question should be, “What’s wrong with a system that decides your worth based on your postcode and your parents’ bank balance?”
Same brains. Different outcomes. The label stays the same, but the life you get depends entirely on the lottery of where and when and to whom you were born.
The kid with ADHD in a wealthy family gets tutors, medication, understanding, and eventually goes to Oxford. The kid with ADHD in a poor family gets labelled “disruptive,” excluded from school, and ends up in the criminal justice system. Same brain. Same neurodivergency. Completely different life trajectory. And we pretend this is about individual merit rather than systemic privilege.
Nothing New: Neurodivergency Throughout Human History.
And here’s what really gets me - this isn’t new. The Romans had it. The Egyptians had it. Every civilisation has had people whose brains worked differently. We just called them different things: Eccentric. Mad. Touched by the gods. Prophets. Heretics.
For millennia, we’ve tried to categorise it, control it, cure it, or worship it. Then the twenty-first century arrives, and we finally get a label: “Neurodivergent.” As if naming it suddenly makes it real.
But we’re still doing the same things. Still trying to fix the people who don’t fit. Still elevating the dangerous ones to power. We’ve just swapped “mad” for “neurodivergent” and carried on exactly as before.
Van Gogh’s ear wasn’t “artistic temperament,” it was a mental health crisis. Newton’s obsessive focus wasn’t “genius,” it was autism. Churchill’s “black dog” wasn’t sadness, it was depression. Tesla’s compulsions weren’t quirks, they were OCD.
We’ve always been here. We’ve always been different. The only thing that’s changed is what we call it.
The Self-Medication Economy: Drugs, Alcohol, and Who Profits.
And whilst we’re talking about how people cope with their particular brand of neurodivergency, let’s address the elephant in the room - or rather, the powder in the baggie and the bottle in the cupboard. Because if you want to see neurodivergency manifesting in its purest, most desperate form, look at how people self-medicate.
Drugs and alcohol. The great equalisers. The universal coping mechanisms. The things we reach for when our brains won’t shut up, won’t slow down, won’t stop screaming at us that something’s wrong. That’s not addiction in the way they teach it in school - that’s neurodivergent brains trying to find their own off-switch because society won’t provide one.
You’ve got people with ADHD discovering that cocaine makes them feel normal for the first time in their lives. People with anxiety finding that alcohol is the only thing that quiets the constant catastrophising. People with depression realising that heroin makes the emptiness go away. These aren’t moral failures - these are brains that work differently, desperately trying to self-regulate in a world that criminalises the attempt.
And the beautiful irony? The people producing and distributing these drugs - the cartels, the dealers, the kingpins - they’re possibly the most off-the-scale neurodivergent specimens we’ve got. What kind of brain do you need to build a billion-pound empire based on human suffering? To organise logistics that would make Amazon jealous, to manage supply chains across continents, to calculate risk and reward whilst literally decapitating the competition?
That’s not normal entrepreneurship. That’s a brain so devoid of empathy, so fixated on power and profit, so utterly divorced from human consequence that it can treat people as commodities without a flicker of conscience. Pablo Escobar wasn’t a businessman - he was a neurodivergent sociopath who found his niche. El Chapo wasn’t a criminal mastermind - he was someone whose particular brain wiring made him brilliant at organisation and completely incapable of caring about human life.
We call them monsters. We call them evil. But what they actually are is neurodivergent in the most dangerous way possible, operating in a black market created by governments run by... other neurodivergent people who think criminalising substances instead of regulating them is somehow a solution.
And then there’s alcohol. Oh, alcohol. The socially acceptable drug. The one we prescribe ourselves. The liquid medication that’s perfectly legal, heavily taxed, and actively encouraged by a society that knows damn well it’s killing us but can’t figure out a better way to help us cope.
Because that’s what it is, isn’t it? Prescribed medication in liquid form. Your GP won’t give you anything for your anxiety - two-year waiting list, remember? - but Tesco will sell you a bottle of wine for a fiver. Can’t sleep because your brain won’t stop racing? The NHS can’t help you, but the off-licence can. Struggling with social situations because you’re autistic and no one ever taught you how to mask properly? Have a pint. Have three. Suddenly you’re “fun.”
Alcohol is society’s admission that it knows we’re all struggling, all neurodivergent in our own ways, all desperately trying to cope - but instead of fixing the systems that make us miserable, it’s easier to just sell us the numbing agent and tax it for revenue.
And it works differently for everyone because, surprise surprise, we’re all neurodivergent. Some brains get loud and aggressive on alcohol - that’s one neurological response. Some get weepy and emotional - that’s another. Some get brave and confident - that’s a third. Some just get sleepy. It’s all the same substance, but our different brains process it differently, use it for different purposes, become dependent on it in different ways.
The person drinking to silence their anxiety isn’t the same as the person drinking to feel something, isn’t the same as the person drinking because it’s the only time their brain lets them relax. Same bottle, different ingredients, different outcomes.
And society’s response? “Just drink responsibly.” As if responsibility is the issue. As if telling someone with depression to “just drink less” is any more helpful than telling them to “just cheer up.” We’re neurodivergent people using a neurotoxin to manage our neurodivergency because the actual support systems are underfunded, overwhelmed, or non-existent.
Meanwhile, the drinks industry - the breweries, the distilleries, the pub chains - they’re making billions off our collective neurodivergent need to self-medicate. They’re not evil, exactly. They’re just operating in a system that’s decided it’s more profitable to sell us the solution in a bottle than to address why we need the bottle in the first place.
And the drug dealers? The cartels? They’re doing the exact same thing, just without the government licence and the tax revenue. Different side of the law, same exploitation of neurodivergent brains desperately seeking relief.
So we’ve got neurodivergent people using drugs and alcohol to cope with a world designed by neurodivergent people who lack empathy, whilst other neurodivergent people profit from both the legal and illegal supply chains, and the neurodivergent politicians pretend the solution is more prison sentences and more tax revenue rather than actually addressing why half the population needs to be medicated - legally or otherwise - just to get through the day.
It’s neurodivergency all the way down. Just some of it comes with a prescription, some comes with a licence, some comes with a criminal record, and all of it comes with the same message: you’re on your own, figure it out, and whatever you do, keep consuming.
The Mask Wearers: Five Years After COVID.
And speaking of different coping mechanisms - we’ve got people walking around wearing face masks five years after COVID. What’s that about?
I’ll tell you what it’s about. It’s the same thing it’s always been about. Different brains processing threat differently. Some brains looked at COVID, saw the danger, assessed the risk, got vaccinated, and moved on when the immediate crisis passed. That’s one recipe. Then you’ve got the brains that can’t let go of the threat assessment. The danger might have passed for everyone else, but their neurological alarm system is still screaming. So the mask stays on. Not because they’re stupid - they’re not - but because their brain’s risk calculator is stuck on maximum alert and won’t reset.
And here’s where it gets interesting - we mock them. “Still wearing a mask? COVID’s over, mate.” But those same people mocking them? Half of them are neurodivergent in a different direction. They’re the ones who never wore masks in the first place, even when people were dying by the thousands, because their brains can’t process invisible threats. If they can’t see it, it’s not real. Different ingredient, same neurodivergent base.
Then you’ve got the ones still wearing masks because their brains are wired for social anxiety, and the mask became a comfort object. A barrier. A way to hide in public. COVID gave them a socially acceptable reason to cover their face, and now that reason’s gone, but the need hasn’t. That’s not about germs anymore - that’s about a brain that found a coping mechanism and doesn’t want to give it up.
These will be the same people who’ll wear a mask when they’re driving alone in their car for fear of constantly reinfecting themselves, and even wear a seatbelt whilst watching the telly. Their brains have taken the threat assessment protocol and applied it to everything. Every surface is dangerous. Every breath is a risk. The car might be empty, but what if there are germs from the last time someone was in it? Better safe than sorry. And once that neurological pattern gets established, it doesn’t matter if it makes sense to anyone else - their brain has created a ritual, and breaking rituals causes more anxiety than following them, no matter how absurd they look from the outside.
And the conspiracy theorists who think the masks are about control, about compliance, about some grand government plan? That’s another flavour entirely. Brains that are so pattern-seeking, so desperate to find meaning in chaos, that they can’t accept that sometimes bad things just happen. There has to be a reason, a plan, someone to blame. That’s not rationality - that’s a neurological need for the world to make sense, even if the sense it makes is terrifying.
Five years later, and we’re all still showing our ingredients. Some can’t let go of the fear. Some never felt it in the first place. Some found a new security blanket. Some found a new conspiracy. Same pandemic, same virus, completely different neurological responses.
And none of them are wrong, exactly. They’re just different recipes trying to exist in the same kitchen, all convinced their way of cooking is the only way that makes sense.
The mask wearers and the mask refusers are two sides of the same neurodivergent coin. Both groups have brains that process threat differently from the “middle ground.” Both groups are absolutely convinced they’re right. And both groups are being genuine - their brains genuinely work that way. This isn’t about stupidity or stubbornness. It’s about different neurological threat assessment systems that were useful in different evolutionary contexts, but now just make us fight with each other on Twitter.
The Final Word: Why We’re Not the Ones Who Need Fixing.
So here’s what it comes down to: we’re all neurodivergent, and we always have been. The anxious, the obsessive, the dreamers, the schemers - we’re not broken. We’re just different recipes made from the same ingredients.
But this world wasn’t built for different. It was built by the few who weaponised their neurodivergency into power, whilst the rest of us got labelled, medicated, and marginalised.
ADHD, autism, anxiety, depression, OCD - these aren’t disorders. They’re different operating systems trying to run on hardware designed by people who think founding religions based on voices in their heads is normal, as long as you’re powerful enough to get away with it.
We’ve been doing this since civilisation began - calling it madness, genius, sin, prophecy - but it’s always been the same: human brains being gloriously, frustratingly, dangerously different, with those in power exploiting that difference for everything it’s worth.
So maybe it’s time we stopped pretending there’s a normal to aspire to. Maybe it’s time we recognised that neurodiversity isn’t the problem - it’s the solution we’ve been too collectively neurodivergent to see.
Because until we build a world that celebrates different brains instead of punishing them, we’ll keep producing the same result: a planet run by psychopaths, sociopaths, and narcissists, whilst the rest of us sit at keyboards at 3 AM, hoping someone will finally understand that we’re not the ones who need fixing.
The system is.
So What Now?
Recognising the system is broken doesn’t automatically fix it. But it’s the first step. Because once you see that neurodivergency is the norm - that the system exploits rather than accommodates that reality - you can’t unsee it.
You stop blaming yourself for not fitting into boxes designed to contain you. You stop thinking medication alone will solve problems caused by poverty, inequality, and power-hungry sociopaths. You stop accepting that the way things are is the way they have to be.
And maybe - just maybe - you start demanding better. Not coping strategies. Not more mindfulness apps. Not another politician promising change whilst their brain is wired exactly like the last one.
Actual systemic change. A world built for all the different ways brains work, not just the ones that serve capitalism and control.
Will it happen? Probably not in our lifetimes. The people in power benefit too much from things staying exactly as they are.
But at least we’ll stop lying to ourselves about who the real problem is.
So here I am at 3 AM, still at this keyboard, still pouring words out. Still neurodivergent. Still different. Still unable to fit into the boxes they’ve built for us.
And I’m done apologising for it.
Maybe you should be, too.
What’s Coming in Part 4: The Machinery
We’ve covered the people (Part 1), the systems (Part 2), and how we cope (Part 3). But there’s one final piece that explains why nothing ever changes, no matter who you vote for.
Part 4 reveals:
The Permanent Government: Civil Servants - Why people whose brains need process and hierarchy control whether policies actually get implemented
The Invisible Influencers: Special Advisors - What “SpAd” even means and why they have power without accountability
The Violence Managers: Defence Chiefs & Military Leadership - What kind of brain can send people to die and attend dinner the same evening
The Paranoia Professionals: MI5, MI6, GCHQ - Why the intelligence services hire brains that would be diagnosed as “paranoid” in any other context
The Shadow PM: The Cabinet Secretary - The most powerful person you’ve never heard of and why they outlast every politician
Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: the people you vote for are temporary. The machinery is permanent. And the machinery’s brains are wired specifically to resist change.
Read Part 4: “The Neurodivergent World: The Machinery”
Subscribe to www.thealmightygob.com to get notified when Part 4 drops.
Read the complete series:
Part 3: How We Cope, Who Profits, and Why Nothing Changes (you are here)
Related topics: neurodiversity acceptance, ADHD and addiction, autism and substance abuse, self-medication strategies, mental health and society, COVID anxiety, social anxiety coping, drug policy reform, alcohol industry profits, neurodivergent history, systemic oppression, cognitive diversity, brain differences, mental health awareness, addiction and neurodivergency, coping mechanisms, anxiety disorders, depression and society, postcode lottery, class and mental health, British working class, poverty and ADHD