Non-thoughts & Mindlessness

Somewhere along the way, we convinced ourselves that thought is a tool, that more of it, sharper, faster, better-focused thought, would make us wiser, more productive, more in control. But sometimes I wonder if thinking is more like a fog machine. Sometimes it doesn’t clarify, it clouds. And the harder we try to focus, the denser the fog becomes. Maybe the mind, like a scratched lens, doesn’t need pressure, maybe it needs stillness to reset.

Now, before I go further, let me be upfront. This is my own theory, stitched together from little bit of reading and a weird amount of sky-staring. I’m not a neuroscientist. I’ve done my research, but this isn’t peer-reviewed truth. So take the science with a pinch of salt. This isn’t a lecture, it’s a reflection. A model I built to explain what I was feeling, not to tell anyone how their brain works.

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Most meditation programs are about focus. They teach you how to anchor your attention, breath, sound, candle, mantra. But for me, that never really worked. It just added another layer. I wasn’t feeling my breath, I was thinking about how to feel my breath. It became meta. I wasn’t present, I was performing presence. I was trying to have a moment instead of just living in one.

So a few weeks back, I dropped the act of mindfulness (a term these apps supposedly provide). I started an experiment: deliberate mindlessness.

Each evening into the night, I just walk up to the terrace and stare at the sky. That’s it. No phone, No music No book, No intention, No attempt to “observe” or “reflect” or “process.” I just stand there and exist. Let my mind go wherever it wants. Let it feel whatever it wants. I don’t even try to stop thoughts. That’s the trick, I let the whole circus run wild.

There’s something quietly profound about that. Just doing nothing. Letting the day roll over you. Not analyzing the clouds or poeticizing the sun. Just watching. Just being. There’s a kind of beauty that lives only in unhurried repetition. In routines, In wiping the mirror every morning, In noticing that the leaves have slightly changed since yesterday. I don’t chase meaning. I let it drift. And sometimes it lands softly, without asking for applause.

Most of the time, I end up daydreaming. (Ask me about it sometime, the content of those dreams says more than any journal ever could.) But somewhere between 50 to 60 minutes in, something odd begins to happen. My brain starts unclenching. The background noise starts dimming. I begin to notice again, not just objects or sounds, but the realness of them.

Sometimes a tear comes out of my eye, not because I’m sad, but because I don’t know what else to do with the clarity. Sometimes I laugh at jokes my old friend cracked ten years ago, only now getting how good they were. Or often I feel nothing. And even then that feels real.

Obviously, I needed to understand why.

At first glance, yes, dopamine. Our generation’s villain and hero. We all know how our phones hijack dopamine loops meant for survival and twist them into a casino machine of likes, scrolls, and synthetic validation. (Also, side note, I watched The Substance today, freaky but beautiful in a grotesque way, and immediately, my mind wanted to write about beauty and decay, see how easily it derails?)

But the real insight didn’t come from dopamine. It came from networks.

Your brain isn’t one neat organ doing “thinking.” It’s a whole ecosystem. Multiple mini-brains, clusters and circuits like the Default Mode Network (DMN), Salience Network, Executive Control Network, all operating semi-independently, like rival departments in a chaotic office building. They’re constantly switching roles, handing over tasks, interrupting each other mid-sentence. Memory, emotion, planning, daydreaming, all handled by different regions. And the transitions between them? Messy. Fast. Draining.

You only get a few seconds with each thought before another one hijacks the mic. So your brain keeps flipping channels, trying to balance awareness, decisions, regrets, imagined futures, unresolved feelings. It’s not bad focus, it’s fragmented architecture. That’s why even when we do nothing, we still feel exhausted. Burnt out. Fried from the inside.

(And to be honest, this is what an autistic/ADHD mind often feels like too, everything turned up at once, no filter, no off switch. But that’s another story.)

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So when I stare at the sky, I’m not “doing nothing.” I’m giving these networks time to breathe. Each one gets a rep. One thought walks up. Has its moment. Walks off. Then another. The mind starts to realise, oh right, I don’t have to worry about that dentist appointment, it’s next week. That interview? I don’t even know who the interviewer is yet. Dinner? Already ordered, cheat day. The backlog starts processing itself, one file at a time.

Eventually, something beautiful happens. The thoughts don’t just slow down, they collapse. Not into emptiness, but into order. Like mental singular value decomposition. The noise gets filtered. The essential stays. And what’s left is a kind of clarity that feels earned, not forced. No YouTube meditation guide can hand this to you. No detox video can shortcut it.

This is defragmentation. Not a shutdown. A reset. After that, the thoughts that come in are different. Sharper. Deeper. Not the kind that loops or nags. But the kind that actually means something. That wants to stay. You don’t even have to hold onto them. They hold onto you.

Now, this is just my theory, but I think the people we admire, Einstein, Da Vinci, that soft-spoken uncle who seems to have a library in his brain, your grandmother who holds your face like it’s a sacred relic, I think they had one thing we lost.

No cheap dopamine machines!!

No infinite scroll, no constant ping of performance. They had to sit in their own minds. Wrestle with boredom. Walk with their thoughts. Sometimes even get scared by them. But they had no exit. And that forced something to grow, depth.

We, on the other hand, became speed-thinkers. 10 thoughts in 10 seconds. Tabs open in our heads like browser windows. And we mistake this chaos for intelligence.

But maybe what we lost isn’t sharpness. Maybe what we lost is weight. Maybe staring at the sky, letting the thoughts come and go like weather, is the only way to remember how deep the mind can go when you stop trying to dig.

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It took me some time to “allow” myself to be bored, to be not productive…

Because somewhere in the rhythm of a quiet day, there’s a truth we’ve been too fast to notice. A truth that doesn’t shout. It just repeats. Slowly. Like brushing your teeth every morning… folding the bedsheet the same way or even noticing the same shadow crawl across the floor at 5:00 PM. Nothing dramatic. Nothing heroic. Just a quiet pattern that says, “I’m here.”

There’s a kind of life that doesn’t need stimulation to feel alive. It doesn’t run from silence, it doesn’t check its reflection for meaning, it just does the small things…fully! Not because they lead to some greater outcome, but because they’re already complete.

This kind of life isn’t anti-technology. It’s just not seduced by it. It doesn’t reject modernity, it just doesn’t panic in its absence, it allows space, it breathes, it slows, it doesn’t measure a day by how much was achieved, but by how much was noticed. Obviously that it is not some fictional story, it is Your life.

In that stillness, you don’t become less. You just become less tangled. And what’s left isn’t productivity. It’s presence.

So yeah, try it. I’m not telling you to go and stare at the sky every night like I did. I’m just telling you to remember what it feels like to be here without needing to be anything else. I won’t sell it as some mantra because I don’t know if this will help You. Because it is not solution to every problem, it is just another technique. It didn’t change my life upside down, but it definitely changed me to a certain extent.

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Take care and thanks for reading! 🙂