We All Have ADHD Now

What Sarawak is paying attention to, and what it is ignoring

Modern life is loud. Modern business is complicated. The world is changing very fast. We often describe ourselves as busy, but being busy today is not just about having a lot to do. It is about having too many things pulling at our attention at the same time.

Years ago (ok many years ago), there was a series of articles in Fortune magazine that interviewed CEOs of top US companies, including Bill Gates, on how they dealt with their workload. Mr Gates himself received (at the time) some 1,200 emails a day and he would spend 4 hours in the morning going through all of them. It was a case study in hyper-efficiency and effectiveness.

These days, we are bombarded by more than just emails: WhatsApp messages, meetings requests and actual meetings, notification red-dots, news headlines, podcasts everywhere, 24-hour breaking news, social media feeds, and dashboards... all compete for the same slice of mental pie. The result is not productivity. It is a source of stress, anxiety, like heavy traffic noise. We start one task and jump to another. We skim instead of read. We react instead of think. By the end of the day, we feel exhausted without having done anything that truly mattered. We can’t all be like Bill Gates.

In that sense, we all have ADHD now. Not as a medical condition, but as a social one.

Attention has become the rarest commodity of our time. Oil was the strategic resource of the 20th century. Data was the obsession of the early 21st. Today, everything is fighting for our attention. Platforms are designed to keep us scrolling. News is written to provoke emotion. Meetings are scheduled to show activity. Even tools meant to help us become productive often end up creating more tasks instead of less work. (There are trainings where you learn how to use specific tools to manage your work, instead of just doing the work, therefore delaying doing the work.)

Sometimes the big headlines are thrilling. They give us the feeling that something important is happening. With the precious little time we have, many of us consume news by reading only the big headlines. (This is why you are reading The Sarawakian, I know.)

But headlines are not the same as understanding.

What really matters are the patterns that only appear over time. These patterns do not usually make headlines. They do not come with nice photos or dramatic speeches. They rarely get much column space. The biggest patterns are quiet. They sit underneath the noise. You only see them when you slow down and compare what has been happening month after month, year after year. That requires something modern life makes difficult: quiet contemplation.

Businesses suffer from this too. Strategy becomes a slide deck instead of a discipline. Leaders chase trends instead of building capability. Companies pivot so often they forget what they stand for. Everyone says they are aligned, but very few people are truly focused.

We even celebrate this behaviour. We praise multitasking. We reward instant replies. We admire people who are always available. Over time, organisations become reactive instead of deliberate. They move a lot, but they do not necessarily move forward.

Now put this in a Sarawak context.

What are we paying attention to here?

We pay a lot of attention to announcements, to ceremonies, to photo opportunities. We argue about who said what, who got what, and who offended whom. We treat projects as symbols instead of systems. A new airport, a new bridge, a new hospital, or a new strategic blueprint becomes a story for a few days and then disappears under the next wave of noise.

Meanwhile, slower and more important questions struggle to hold our attention. How good are our schools, really. How competitive are our small and medium-sized businesses. How capable are our managers. How ready are our young people to work beyond Sarawak. How attractive are we to investors who compare us with Vietnam, Indonesia or Thailand, not just with Sabah.

In a small market with a limited talent pool and thin margins for error, scattered attention is dangerous. When everyone is half-focused, learning slows down. Standards stop rising. Mediocrity becomes comfortable because no one has the time or energy to challenge it.

There is also an emotional cost. Constant interruption keeps us in a state of low-level anxiety. We never fully finish, never fully rest, and never fully concentrate. Work leaks into evenings. News leaks into family time. Opinions leak into identity. It becomes harder to sit with complexity, and complexity is exactly what development requires.

So what do we do, short of moving to a limestone cave in the mountains?

The first step is to recognise that attention is limited. Treat it like money. Decide what deserves it and what does not. Not every message is urgent. Not every trend is relevant. Not every controversy deserves days of collective outrage.

Second, as leaders we need to design for focus, not just speed. Fewer priorities. Clearer decisions. More respect for deep work. A government that launches too many initiatives at once risks creating motion without direction. A company that changes direction every few months is not agile. It is anxious.

Third, we need to relearn how to think in longer arcs. Issues like education quality, competitiveness, climate adaptation and talent development cannot be solved in headline-sized pieces. They require sustained attention over years, not days. If our institutions cannot hold focus, they cannot hold strategy.

Finally, we need a cultural shift. We should stop glorifying busy-ness and start valuing clarity. We should reward people who simplify instead of complicate. We should admire those who can say, “This is what matters,” and mean it.

Saying “we all have ADHD” is not about mocking a real condition. It is about naming a collective problem. We live in a world that knows how to capture attention but not how to protect it. In Sarawak, the real question is not whether we are busy. It is whether we are busy with the right things.