  Escape . . . It's astounding how much of our world is based upon avoiding our problems. You would think that in our fast-paced and efficiency-driven society, solving problems and achieving goals quickly and efficiently would be one of our top priorities. On the contrary, it seems that following through with our thoughts to their final completion has a very low priority for most modern people.
This difficulty appears in the workplace, where there are so many layers of management that any problem simply exists forever in the pool of unfinished tasks, shunted from executive to executive, until eventually it is a moot point. But primarily it appears in people's day-to-day lives, where they avoid dealing with unfinished thoughts, unpleasant ideas, and unwanted consequences. As I look inside my mind, I'm unsure what to call what I see. In a childish way I wish to give it a childish label: "A Swirling Vortex of Doom!!! " However juvenile the term may be, I believe it has some merit. My mind is definitely a swirling vortex.
Unfinished thoughts, ideas, and emotions tumble on without end. Nothing is ever resolved. In our modern and busy life, you never have time to actually resolve an issue: everything is given a Band-Aid-style fix, and then you move on to the next item. Unfortunately, every unfinished thought stays in your poor mind, polluting your consciousness and buzzing with unfulfilled desires. It might be easy to say you can go about your everyday life, not really needing to have a truly clean and fresh mind. You might want to leave such luxuries to philosophers or other thinkers, since you believe your life has not been adversely affected by these stray thoughts.
However, I know a good many people who suffer from some of the symptoms of having too many unfinished thoughts floating around their mind. An inability to fall, or stay, asleep is a prominent one. I've heard many people complaining on buses, subways, or restaurants, about having been unable to sleep last night because they couldn't clear their mind, or being woken up in the middle of the night and being unable to get back to sleep for one or two hours, due to some persistent thought they couldn't dismiss. One major cause of this? Your mind is trying to resolve these contentious and polluting issues, while you refuse to give it the chance to do so. It is unable to achieve the necessary level of clarity required for sleep.
A lack of focus in the workplace is another common symptom of having an occupied mind. How many times have you been sitting at work, trying to focus on your daily tasks, when your mind keeps wandering off towards other concerns? It is extremely difficult to dedicate your undivided attention to a topic when your subconscious mind wants to give your attention to other thoughts. However, most frequently, you simply try to brush aside those other subconscious thoughts for later consideration, focusing solely on your work-related tasks. You have deemed clearing your mind of unwanted ideas to be unworthy of your time, even though dealing with those extraneous thoughts before turning to the task at hand will lead to greater productivity and a more efficient use of your time. Modern society seems to encourage leaving thoughts unresolved.
People, on some subconscious level, know they need to have clear minds. They know in order to truly relax, they need to be working with an empty slate. However, most people don't know how to achieve this state. So, they turn to the answers society provides: drugs, alcohol, sex, vacations. These classic things are the goals of most men's recreation. But you look at these goals, and what they do for your mind.
Do they help you deal with the issues at hand? No. Do they help permanently push them out of your mind? Not a chance. What they do is temporarily alleviate the stresses on your soul. They help you forget about the woes of everyday life; they don’t actually deal with them, but merely allow you to put them out of your mind for a very short time.
There are more permanent and productive alternatives out there. Meditation, talking out your problems with friends, or analytically dealing with these issues, are just a few of the simpler and more available ones. And upper management is slowly latching onto these ideas, with therapists and psychologists abounding to listen to your problems, many mini-retreats with courses on how to solve problems and achieve your goals, and ever popular self-help books offering to teach you how to center yourself and calm your mind. But there are still millions of middlemen out there who haven't worked a problem through to satisfactory completion in many years. The only time they ever achieve silence of the mind is while on a beach in the Caribbean or drunk out of their minds. I think people need to deal with their problems.
It's a hard process to begin, but once begun, the clarity you've achieved will help you deal with more and more problems, until eventually you're walking through everyday life with the same relaxed mentality as most people only achieve in a drunken stupor. People need to focus their lives less on drink and on vacation and focus their lives more on personal development of the mind, and dealing with their own internal issues. This may not be the key to eternal happiness, but it may be a helpful and simple step towards that elusive goal. xBuBzx 
