Yeah I think mindfulness is not about ignoring your problems. It's more about not letting your mind wander unnecessarily. I think this is our gift and curse as humans--we can plan for the future and reminisce on the past, which enables great achievements, but tied up with this kind of 'time traveling' thinking are emotions like anxiety, sadness, disappointment. So if we could somehow just be efficient calculating machines we wouldn't need this philosophy.
(Although lately I've been realizing that if we were just cold calculating machines maybe we wouldn't have complex drives and passions, so probably emotions are not just an extraneous 'curse', and are part of why we do what we do.)