It feels like life is too much effort for too little reward

This is literally what's happening in your brain. Assume that every effort needs to get past a threshold (say threshold of cognition-to-action) . For neurotypicals, they can easily get past that line without much effort pretty much any time (unless it is a difficult task). Either because they have the mental energy to get up there easily or because in their world the gravity is like 5x lighter.

For us, those easy tasks (lifting a 25lb box from the floor onto a desk seems like carrying a 50lb box up to 10th floor =this'd be equivalent to a difficult ask for NT). are seemingly impossible because we either just don't have that much mental energy; or in our world, the gravity is just 5x stronger.

/r/ADHD Thread