"Ought"-ism
The Tragic Burden of the Neurotypical
In this week’s opinion essay, I explore creative freedom.
We might not be as free as we think, as many of us aren’t trapped by rules we can see; we’re trapped by the ones we never question. I’ve spent years calling things a “failure” that were just misfits with the wrong structure. Turns out, the problem wasn’t the canvas; it was the frame.
“Ought”-ism
The Tragic Burden of the Neurotypical
As a proud member of the neurodivergent community—severe ADHD and dyslexia, diagnosed in my late 40s—I want to offer my neurotypical friends a small discomfort:
You might be the ones trapped.
With the exception of pluralism—and maybe optimism, provided it doesn’t lapse into toxic positivity—I regard most -isms as a blight. The obvious ones are bad enough. But at least you can see them, name them, and fight them. The more dangerous ones don’t announce themselves. They are hidden in plain sight, backed by convention, reinforced by approval, and passed off as common sense.
I’ve come to think of one in particular as Oughtism—the constant pressure to do what one ought to do.
And the community most affected by it is the neurotypical one. More generally, “conventional thinking” covers it, and, more insidiously, “conventional wisdom.”
Thirty years ago, I used to write songs. I’d been in a band signed to Island Records in the 90s—achieving modest success but nothing dramatic—and, after leaving the UK for New York, I started from scratch, attending open mics and developing a stripped-back set with more personal material. The plan was to build something new.
It never happened, or, at least, not as planned.
Life moved on. Family and a corporate career offered a different kind of success, and music became something private, then something abandoned altogether.
I recently picked up a classical guitar and started playing again. Not the old band material, but Brazilian jazz, fingerstyle arrangements—disciplined, structured, complex, and controlled. And then, without really meaning to, I drifted back into those old songs, and immediately ran into the same problem I’d had thirty years earlier.
They didn’t work: not as much in an emotional way, or aesthetically, but structurally.
The melodies were right—I knew that much, even back then; they had elegance and the phrasing I wanted—but they felt cramped, forced into spaces too small for them. Lines collided, and breathing room disappeared. They felt wrong.
At the time, I blamed myself; lack of talent, lack of discipline, discomfort with singing, and some vague sense that I didn’t quite know what I was doing. So, I did what most people do: I tried to make the round peg fit.
Most pop music is written in 4/4 time—four beats to the bar. It’s steady, predictable, and easy to follow. Count along with Billie Jean and Smells Like Teen Spirit.
1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4.
Some songs use 6/8. It’s a different feel; more rolling, but still grounded. Think: We Are the Champions, Hallelujah, Everybody Hurts.
1-2-3-4-5-6-1-2-3-4-5-6.
The vast majority of pop uses only these two. Why? Because they work so well, and they feel familiar, because it’s what Western Pop is supposed to sound like. (Traditional Indian, Chinese, or Brazilian musicians, please don’t laugh at us.)
So, what should I do when what I’m trying to say doesn’t fit inside that structure?
The answer is almost embarrassingly obvious: I needed to give it more space. Once I saw this, I reworked the material.
Those melodies that had previously felt awkward, overlong, or badly written; they weren’t wrong, they were just too constrained. I’d been forcing them into a framework in which they didn’t belong, because that was the framework I’d been taught.
So, I broke it: 7/8. 5/4. Time signatures that shifted mid-phrase. Passages that expanded and contracted depending not on what convention demanded but on what the line needed.
In some cases, consecutive bars required changes to the time signature, all in the same section of a verse: 7/8 – 4/4 – 7/8 – 6/8.
On paper, this looks messy and unstable—certainly unorthodox, and even chaotic. But in reality, when they were sung, they felt completely natural. The lines immediately felt “at home.” The music finally breathed and flowed organically.
Nothing was ever wrong with the writing, per se; it was the presumptuous, blind adherence to conventional structure that was wrong. And I’d been calling that failure of writing.
This is what “Oughtism” does. It offers us a convincing, generic framework of how things are done—this is what works; this is what’s acceptable; this is what’s normal. And if we, for whatever reason, don’t fit, the assumption is not that the framework is limited; it’s that we are.
I spent most of my early life being measured against systems that didn’t account for how my mind worked, systems that demanded sitting still, paying attention in prescribed ways, and processing information linearly. My neurological recoiling was interpreted as deliberate rebelliousness, and I was labeled disruptive, unfocused, underperforming, and a problem to be managed.
But the problem, as it turns out, was never the ADHD—I’ve succeeded in adult life not despite my ADHD but because of it. The problem was the assumption of neurotypicality—the invisible rule set that defines what “normal” looks like and ostracises anything and anyone who falls outside of it’s meagre accommodations.
We’d like to believe that the structures around us are fixed; that they reflect something real and necessary. But in reality, most of them are just one-size-fits-all agreements, social rhythms, default settings, and inherited patterns.
And, like musical time signatures, they work beautifully… most of the time.
The danger with Oughtism isn’t that it presses for conformity; it’s that it makes conformity feel like an absolute truth. It trains us to ignore the instinct that knows something doesn’t fit, to override it, to correct ourselves, to compress what we are into what’s expected—into what we ought to be.
And if we do that long enough, we forget there was ever another option. We stop questioning it.
When revisiting my old songs, I didn’t just hear them differently; I saw myself differently.
What I’d assumed was a lack of ability was, in many cases, misalignment. What I’d framed as a shortcoming in quality was often friction with conventional structures that didn’t serve what I was trying to create.
But the moment I stopped asking what I ought to do, and started asking what the work actually required, the music opened up.
And not just the music.
Oughtism tells us to conform.
Freedom, on the other hand, begins only when we realize we can discard generic systems in favor of ones that give us the space to fulfill our purpose, authentically and unfettered.
end
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