Pattern: Executive Dysfunction
Executive dysfunction is the most pervasive functional obstacle in Steven’s life. It appears across the journals and it interacts with every other pattern, including substance use, masking, career collapse, and unfinished projects.
Core mechanics
From the therapy transcript, Steven describes it precisely:
“J’ai envie de faire énormément de choses. J’ai un gros, gros problème de dysfonction exécutive… Je commence beaucoup, beaucoup de choses, mais je n’arrive jamais, en fait, à mener les choses au bout… J’ai une task blindness qui est absolue et genre, je me suis déjà observé d’un point de vue extérieur en m’enregistrant… je peux passer d’un truc à un autre sans m’en rendre compte, et genre complètement oublier le truc sur lequel j’étais avant.”
The result is a “chaos absolu”: fifty projects at various stages of beginning, none with enough completion velocity to reach the end. When prioritization is required, the system enters analysis paralysis. All items compete for urgency. No item wins. Nothing starts.
The timer anecdote
The clearest example is the train morning. He needed to catch a train at 10am, had bags to pack, and needed a shower. He woke at 7h30. He spent the morning coding a full-screen countdown timer in collaboration with an AI because he wanted a countdown timer and found the iPad’s default ugly. He finished the timer. He arrived at the train at the time he was supposed to arrive. “En général, je pars à l’heure à laquelle je suis censé arriver.”
This is not laziness. The timer was useful, and he still uses it. The task that absorbed the morning was interesting and completed. The departure time simply had no weight in the moment.
Deadline adrenaline as the primary ignition system
He describes needing “l’adrénaline” of deadline proximity to initiate. Without external pressure, initiation often does not happen, even for tasks he values, wants to do, and has committed to. This is a known ADHD activation mechanism. Future consequences do not gain motivational weight until they are immediate.
This creates problems in creative or open-ended work (no external deadline) and in professional contexts that rely on self-scheduling. It is not absence of motivation. It is absence of the neurological signal that converts intention into action.
How 3-MMC entered this gap
Stimulant substances, including Adderall in California and 3-MMC in Paris, addressed the initiation gap directly. The mechanism was real. They reduced task blindness, activated executive function, and created sustained focus. The problem is that the gap was structural and the solution was chemical. It was temporary, tolerance-building, and ultimately counter-productive.
The perfectionism spiral
Executive dysfunction does not mean low standards. Steven writes about being “coincé dans une spirale perfectionniste en termes de choix d’interface” on COVID Tracker iOS, unable to advance because no UI decision felt acceptable. Perfectionism here is not vanity. It is analysis paralysis applied to aesthetic judgment. He could not commit to a choice, so the project did not ship.
This pattern recurs: the bar is high, the inability to start at the bar causes freezing, freezing causes guilt, guilt increases the bar further.
LLMs as partial intervention
The January 2026 chronicle describes AI tools as helping: “Ma capacité à planifier, réfléchir, résoudre, et même rester cohérent dépend de comment mon propre cerveau répond au support que me donne le modèle que j’utilise à ce moment-là.” The Anthropic interview response is direct: if AI could excel at one thing to help him, it would be “tout ce qui touche au fonctionnement exécutif.”
The daemon system, with unified instructions across AI platforms, temporal anchoring, and loop protection, is a designed prosthesis for executive function.
The frustration
He is consistently lucid about the dysfunction while unable to override it. The frustration is not at the dysfunction itself but at the gap between knowing and doing. He writes in July 2023 about “ma frustration énorme” at being unable to deliver the work pace he wanted when he had the ability. He knew what needed to happen. The knowing was useless.