Motivation Without Slope: ADHD, Demand Avoidance, and the Moralisation of Misfit

Modern work and support systems often assume that effort translates into action in a steady and predictable way through routine, reinforcement, and private self-management, embedding this expectation in institutional infrastructure. For many people with ADHD, this expectation does not hold. Traction can be discontinuous and highly context-dependent, and sustained functioning is often achieved through compensatory pathways such as urgency and acute pressure rather than stable routines. While these strategies can enable short-term performance, they can also be costly when chronic stress becomes the main route to action. When institutions treat their motivational expectations as universal, differences in regulation are frequently moralised as laziness, unreliability, or defiance, and people are praised for crisis performance but blamed for later collapse. Drawing on disability studies, this paper frames these dynamics as institutional misfit rather than individual pathology. It introduces “assumed motivational gradient” as a descriptive metaphor for institutional design bias and outlines implications for disability-informed practice.