The busy mind that achieves nothing
By: Lucas Teoh
Tags: Motivation, Ideas, Army, Thoughts, Stress

“An idle mind is the devil’s workshop,” my friend told me as an arbitrary remark as he casually scrolled through his Instagram feed during our recent class outing.

While meant as a thoughtless comment, it struck a chord within me. The past few months have left me feeling completely stressed out not because I had a lot on hand, but because I didn’t. After putting more thought into it, I realised that I wasn’t built to do nothing. I’ve always kept myself busy whether it be studying, developing my skills or even giving myself strategic rest to perform at my best.

While in the army I felt like I was not in touch with reality. I felt like I was not doing anything with tangible benefits or creating change in myself that would be beneficial in the long run. This sense of emptiness and unproductiveness hence left my mind to run wild and work overdrive. In other words, I was overwhelmed by idleness. While getting dragged along the strict military schedule, my mind got busy coming up with various plans to execute and ideas and thoughts in hopes of entertaining myself. These were because I hate feeling stuck and bound to the confines of something I did not desire in the first place. I started planning my tertiary education path, career path, income streams. All these ideas, all these plans noted in my head and written in my phone and computer. Yet, nothing has ever come to fruition. They are just stuck in these places yet to be executed. Perhaps I was lazy. Perhaps I wasn’t motivated enough. I can’t place my finger on it but the answer was probably somehow related to the latter.

Not only did the idleness lead to thoughts overrunning my head, but it also made me lose interest in the things I was once extremely enthusiastic in. The past two months have found me unlocking my phone only to feel uninterested in any app on my homepage. I didn’t have any videos I was dying to watch or games to play. In a moment of nerdy jest, I told myself that I was experiencing Newton’s first law of motion: an object at rest remains at rest unless acted on by an external force. Perhaps it is because I am busy with nothing. There is nothing to motivate me, no force to spark any flame within me. I stopped baking or dancing, only thinking that it would be at the expense of my physical energy. I didn’t want to start any project because I was tired. I even told my friends when we were out one day to just make all the decisions as I was too tired to make any decisions.

At the same time, I could not help but be tempted by the idea that I was experiencing burnout. Burnout from the relentless work and effort I have been putting in the past 12 years. However, I never once thought of studying as a chore. Maybe it unknowingly sucked too much energy from me. I wouldn’t know.

This mixture of fruitlessness and lackadaisicalness has overwhelmed my mind with busy thoughts without any real outcome but leave me in a state of distress from absolutely nothing. This rather incoherent wall of the text thus far serves as evidence of the messy state of mind I have been in. Until a force is exerted on me, in my external environment or within my internal environment, I hopelessly concede that I will have a busy mind that achieves nothing, ironically deriving from the same nothingness. It is a chaotic state of mind I can’t put my finger on — some kind of almost homogenous mixture of emptiness, helplessness, confusion, depression, uncomfortable solace and many other emotions I have yet to pinpoint. Perhaps this is a result of what the devil has been working on in my mind. Not tempting me to do evil but to swarm my finite brain with a slew of incomprehensible emotions that results in nothing but a chaotic frame of mind. But considering that I have finally posted another entry means that the devil in me may in fact be evicted soon.