I relate to that in a lot of ways. After all, right now in my life, it's really just thoughts and memories that are making me so miserable. Like I've realised that so much of my anxiety is linked to a single bad event (and all the positive experiences of the same type of event get discarded). In fact the computer has frozen and the bad event is stuck on the monitor and that's that.

Your analogy sounds very much like the way Russ Harris talks about thoughts. He wrote The Happiness Trap on ACT therapy, which seems to be largely based on moving these thoughts from completely obscuring the present moment.