From my first bunny hill to AI anxiety: Learning to be present

My wife and I skied for the first time in Montreal last week. We had been nervous — worried about either ending up with extremely sore muscles or, worse, getting injured. But we both survived the bunny hills and, surprisingly, felt fine in the following days! We had fun, and we were proud of ourselves.

The experience was a great reminder for me not to overthink. Even in this bizarre period of uncertainty and anxiety — shaped by rapid AI advancements and the political impacts of Trump on the U.S., Canada, and Taiwan — I can choose to be present.

But how does one stay present while facing so many daunting events? Oliver Burkeman’s recent article, Reality is Right Here, provides a practical guide:

⁠… as far as you can manage it, you should make sure your psychological centre of gravity is in your real and immediate world – the world of your family and friends and neighborhood, your work and your creative projects, as opposed to the world of presidencies and governments, social forces and global emergencies.

So how do we cultivate the mindset to pinpoint this “center of gravity” within ourselves? Burkeman elaborates:

It means treating the world of national and international events as a place that you visit – to campaign or persuade, donate or volunteer, to do whatever you feel is demanded of you – and that you then return from, in order to gain perspective, and to spend time doing some of the other things a meaningful life is about.

I really love this mindset. Just as I shouldn’t have overthought the potential risks before skiing, nor should I keep living in the exciting memory of my first sharp turn on the bunny hill once I’m back home. That doesn’t diminish the value of the experience — our visit to Montreal, though. The trip enriched our lives with new experiences, and when we returned, we were slightly but meaningfully different people.

That said, what if “your work and your creative projects” themselves become a source of anxiety? As a software engineer and designer, the potential career disruptions from AI have been wrecking my nerves (and possibly many of yours too). So even when I’m not consuming anxiety-triggering news or ‘visiting’ elsewhere, I still find myself restless at home.

Perhaps the real challenge is not just pinpointing but scaling the size of our “psychological centre of gravity” at will — the ability to fully engage with something while also being able to detach from it when needed. If my work, relationships, and creative pursuits still don’t feel “real and immediate,” I can retreat further — to even smaller, more personal sanctuaries: a solo tennis session, listening to a full album with noise-cancelling headphones, or simply noticing the rhythm of my breath.

Alas, if I woke up tomorrow to find my job replaced by AI, North America in a recession, or Taiwan’s democracy broken — could I still hold on to my peaceful centre of gravity? Probably not. I don’t know.

But I’ll remind myself not to overthink.

And as far as I can manage, to be present.