Here's a confession: I have six browser tabs open right now, a to-do list glaring at me, and a brain that's simultaneously catastrophizing about what’s happening in my house downstairs and how AI is going to change our jobs and lives.
If you've spent any time on this blog, you know I think a lot about the gap between the life we're frantically trying to manage and the life we actually want to be living. A common thread running through all of them is this: we spend enormous amounts of energy fighting battles we can't win, while the things that actually matter quietly wait in the corner. We can blame evolution for some of this.
Our amygdalas—those ancient, reactive little almond-shaped structures in the brain—were built for survival. They're wired to prioritize bad news over good. Today, we respond to a passive-aggressive email with roughly the same physiological urgency as our ancestors felt when a lion was nearby.
The problem isn't just that we overreact. There are vested interests—media, social platforms, insurance companies, etc.—that gain from keeping us on the edge. As a result, we've normalized a state of low-grade panic, treating every inconvenience as an emergency and every emergency as a catastrophe.
The antidote isn't toxic positivity. It's about learning to respond rather than react. To pause, assess the situation, and then act accordingly. One way to do this is to employ the five-year test: Will this (the panic we’re dealing with right now) matter five years from now? Almost always, the answer is no.
So, we try to manage. Which is where it gets interesting, because the way most of us respond to feeling out of control is to grip tighter.
I'll admit it: I am a recovering control freak. I belong to a whole tribe of well-meaning but "can't help ourselves" people who are absolutely convinced that if the world would just follow our instructions, everything would run smoothly. It has never worked, and it never will. We end up stressing ourselves out about things we couldn't have controlled anyway (which turns out to be most things).
The only real way out is surrender, but that does not mean giving up. It means releasing our white-knuckling grip to free up our energy for what we can influence. And by doing that, we realize our anxieties and worries weren’t about control, but about choice.
Sylvia Plath described this perfectly in The Bell Jar with the image of a fig tree: each branch represented a potentially different, wonderful life. A poet on one. A family on another. Europe, a career, a great love, an Olympic medal. She sits at the base of the tree, paralyzed by choice, while watching the figs rot and fall, as she can’t bring herself to pick even one.
That image has haunted me since I first read it, because it's so devastatingly accurate. We live in a world of genuinely limitless options and genuinely limited time. Every yes is a thousand nos. And our brains, already wired for threat-detection and comparison, don’t find solace in that. FOMO, which, by the way, is a fashionable name for a very old human problem: the inability to be where we are, kicks in.
So, we spend time looking at the figs we didn't pick—other people’s Instagram vacation photos, LinkedIn announcements, mourning the lives we never had, while ignoring the one we already inhabit.
The overreaction, the grip, the FOMO, they all share the same root. We are spending most of our time anywhere but here. Bracing for the future, regretting the past, managing other people's perceptions often at the expense of the present moment, where the actual living happens.
This is where the concept of flow state stops being productivity jargon and becomes something genuinely worth caring about. When we're absorbed in something to the point where time disappears, and the inner critic goes quiet, and we learn to be here, it’s not just pleasant. It’s the whole point. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called it flow. Zen Buddhism calls it Ichigyo-Zammai: full concentration on a single act. Either way, it's the opposite of the fragmented, tab-switching, half-present existence most of us are living. And it turns out the only way to access it is to do the thing that every single problem above has been preventing: slow down, pick one thing, and actually be in it. The way our ancestors lived as they fought for survival.
Can we retrain ourselves to go back to living in the present?