going through motions

“The prime minister seems to be going through motions of accepting the result but in reality is in deep denial.”

It isn't going through motions, even though you've sung something a million times - it's wonderful to know you love something so much.

The video, said to have been shot Tuesday in northwestern Syria, shows Idlib province residents going through motions that have become all too familiar in three years of civil war between antigovernment rebels and the forces of President Bashar Assad: surveying the remnants of flattened homes and picking through the debris.

"Everybody looked gray, they looked dead, they looked like robots, like they were going through motions…. My perception was that the reality of the collapse of human industrial civilization — or the reality of their reality — is disintegrating in front of everybody."

The point is, I’m both engaged and separate; going through motions but allowing for mental drift.