What kinds of thoughts do you have of the human mind?
That's kind of a vague question. Too many to list here, can you narrow it down some?
Do you think you know your own mind well? Do you think anyone can ever truly understand the workings of their own mind?
I believe I already answered these ones. To summarize: yes and mostly yes.
Or will they just be caught in an endless loop of doubting and questioning their own nature and motivations?
That's a valid trap. You have to know when to stop, when it would defeat your point to continue, or you're quite right, you'll end up in the same place as some unfortunate lifetime psych patients whose therapists have bought into the idea that if a motivation can be named, it must not be the truth yet, and there must be something deeper.
That's why you have to monitor your own emotional reactions when you're doing self-analysis. For example, when you first start out, it's all virgin territory and quite fascinating and exciting. If you've got past trauma, pretty soon you'll start waking it up and getting all kinds of arbitrary and bizarre emotional responses - anger, fear, jealousy, etc, and also positive stuff (especially if you have depression issues) like unhesitant joy or the sense of your life having purpose. But after that, you get to a point where thoughts that had once been too potent to even admit to will lose their intensity and you'll find you're just going through the motions of analysis, with a growing sense of sickness or futility. That's the point where I think it's important to stop and ask whether your goal is really to erase all the intensity from your life, 'cause that's what'll happen if you keep going. I'm most definitely not Buddhist and I don't believe life's goal is serene emptiness.
Of course there's also one other thing to keep in mind, and that's that in some cases your brain will try to throw all kinds of defenses at you in order to prevent you from looking at certain trauma. And these can look like the desire to stop analyzing. So you also have to learn your own patterns well enough to spot and avoid these defenses. For example one I used to get is exhaustion, suddenly falling asleep when I tried to go down a certain path, regardless of having no sleep debt. So I had to demonstrate to my brain that it couldn't get away with it, by resisting it a couple times, and then it stopped happening.
Do you work as hard as you do because you enjoy it, you like money, or because you don't know wtf else to do with your life so you just go through the motions to preserve some sense of sanity? (not an insult if you do, most of my life has been spent living like that)
At the moment, I work for money and industry contacts. Money, so that I can take enough time off to make a really stunning demo reel, and contacts so that I can get the industry job I want, once I can demonstrate I have the talent to back it up. I actually don't particularly enjoy my job at the moment, it's too technical. I want something that has a combination of technical work and creativity, and so far it's been mostly code and error tracking.
Though there's also some question at the moment as to whether I'm really taking the most direct path to my goals or whether I'm holding myself back based on fear, habit, and a couple other unproductive motivations.
