Imagine you are trying to lose weight and attempting to concentrate on writing an article, but there is a bowl with your favorite chocolate cookies in your field of vision, a permanent immoral offer. If we are capable of rejecting such offers or to postpone them into the future, then we can also concentrate on that which we currently want to do.

I could never understand how someone would embark on their life without having first confronted and clarified the truly fundamental questions.

Speaking as a phenomenologist, it seems to me that a considerable portion of mind wandering actually is "mental avoidance behaviour", an attempt to cope with adverse internal stimuli or to protect oneself from a deeper processing of information that threatens self-esteem.

All attention is introspection.

Imagine you are trying to lose weight and attempting to concentrate on writing an article, but there is a bowl with your favorite chocolate cookies in your field of vision, a permanent immoral offer. If we are capable of rejecting such offers or to postpone them into the future, then we can also concentrate on that which we currently want to do.

Someone who cannot stop his outer flow of words will soon be unable to communicate with other human beings at all.

As a first-order approximation, I would say that phenomenality is "availability for introspective attention": Consciousness is a property of all those mental contents to which you can in principle direct your attention.