What the fuck is FoMO?
It was 2004 when the term FoMO was coined. The infamous “fear of missing out” became the most frequent self-diagnosis of the 21st century. Defined in the Cambridge dictionary as an anxiety about missing exciting events and experiences, FoMO controls lives through the perception of missing out and the compulsive maintenance of social connections.
FoMO is felt when you are doing something subjectively more ‘boring’ than whatever else is going on. With this negative connotation, and FoMO being rooted in anxiety, by default it suggests that you are boring and your life is boring. Which isn’t true.
FoMO, being born and perpetuated by social media, is fuelled by the information overload and increase in accessibility as we are taught that we must ‘do more’; the idea that humans must maintain constant productivity and attainability.
Being fed this type of information, whether we know it or not, makes us feel that we must do more and consume more.
Living a life of doing more is something many people enjoy, including myself. The side hustles, the endless sporting teams, niche hobbies or trips booked for the future. All those things are the joys of life, but it has never occurred to me that it could be a result of societal pressure that we must keep ourselves busy, and that if you are not doing something, you are failing at life. No side hustle? Lazy. No trip booked? Boring. Lifeless. Barren.
Being in your 20s, there’s a grey looming cloud with the million dollar question in it: What are you doing with your life? It’s like we go through a mid-twenties puberty where you notice half your friends are buying houses and half are backpacking around the globe and quite frankly, you have no idea which one you want to do. Fairly quickly “What am I doing with my life?” turns into ‘What am I doing this Saturday?”. And if you're not doing anything, then you must be missing out on something great happening elsewhere.
In the Insta-Feels
Considered as a modern concept, FoMO incites comparison of lives through social media. By normalising virtual and instantaneous human interaction, social anxiety has skyrocketed, where face-to-face interactions are requiring much more effort, and therefore causing a fear of being judged. It doesn't help that social media is usually just a highlight reel, creating a false sense of consistent highs. It is very easy to compare your life to the lives of others. Especially when you are sitting in your PJs that need a wash, while doom scrolling, on your facebook marketplace sofa, in your house where the heating is broken, to someone's aesthetically beautiful and carefully curated instagram post of their festival run: “Some people need therapy, I only need music”. Something I usually think to myself at these times, I have to go next year, but the reality is, comparison is just the thief of joy.
Almost as a compulsive disorder, FoMO creates obsessive and unwanted thoughts. Triggering anxiety, this leads to repetitive acts, like impulsively buying those festival tickets, in hope to reduce the anxiety. Securing those tickets may reduce the itch temporarily, but it won’t make your life any better or any more interesting.
As a FoMO-feeler and survivor myself, I don’t believe this is strictly true (the temporary fix part). While going to the event won’t necessarily make you feel better, it ensures you don’t miss an important moment, or an intergenerational inside joke, which can have a long-lasting effect. Not temporary at all.
The gravity of the situation
Let’s do the calculations.
How do you know if you should go to the event all your friends are going to?
It’s all in the careful deliberation and inner-consciousness equation:
Reasoning:
C: Least amount of unhappiness because, well… obviously. You get to experience something new, while creating memories.
A: Second least amount of unhappiness because you haven’t lost anything, nor have you really gained anything. A) makes me feel pretty impartial. But certainly on the good end, considering how much is on the line.
D: The second highest amount of unhappiness because I love my friends so much that being in a bad mood not only pains me but it can ruin their experience. In this scenario, you can first-hand experience the exciting times, or lack thereof.
B: The greatest amount of unhappiness because you have missed out on something great. You were NOT there and you will forever be left out of those memories. You know what could’ve been.
So this is where you weigh up the risk: How much will FoMO affect you?
This is totally up to you, and it might change from day to day or eras of your life. My younger-self would feel missing out on something much more momentous because I was trying to fit in and I thought always being present would aid that process. But as I grow older and start to realise FoMO is a made up concept, missing out doesn’t feel like the end of the world.
Finding the last inch of optimism
Maybe it’s all about perception. Being able to find beauty in FoMO for the way it makes us feel, for its ebbs and flows and the overwhelming push and pull of social connections, should be celebrated. In fact we need FoMO to survive in this day and age. If you never experience FoMO and never have that fierce and irresistible itch to do that thing next time, then you’ll never experience life with much gusto. You need to want something so badly to perform well, to socialise well, to maximise the takeaways from the decision. You must see all your best friends having the time of their life at an event or trip away, experience the extreme, all consuming FoMO to fuel your fire. You will be the most zealous attendee next time, ready to find out what you’ve missed out on all this time.
While FoMO can be kinda shitty, maybe it is just a necessity of life. Creating an unspoken, somewhat unrealised, fire in the community. There’s an enthusiasm lying in the unknown.
The reality
FoMO is probably a fact of life in the age of social media. It’s about managing the pull towards the unknown and not being tied down by compulsivity and constant availability. In the end of the day, it’s not a catastrophic experience, so while it might occur, try to see the light in it and move on.
While living in a sense of unknown to what is out there, it is important to not let FoMO ruin your inner peace. The compulsion itself is grounded in excitement about the unknown. It could be reason we get out of bed each day, the reason we party, the reason we do anything. Social media provides us with access to the world of endless possibilities and opportunities, which is starting to out grow us. There are too many options now, and what feels like such little time. When our exposure to the world of exciting things far exceeds our capacity to experience them, we enter a near permanent state of FoMo. The problem is that we are not creatures built to experience everything. We should be excited by life, not daunted by its infinite possibilities.
So, what to do about it? The answer is clear; reduce your exposure. Set limits on your screentime, your doom scrolling. Be intentional about the content you seek and ingest. Without ever seeking to dim the FoMo fire in your belly, direct it towards the people and world around you. The real world, not the endless, false world of social media. Watch how the FoMo anxiety spikes (what the hell is going on online that I am missing out on!) then settles, as you realise, your life has not shrunk as a result of your aversion from the screen - on the contrary, you will find yourself cleared and energised to do the things you want to do. Not the things your algorithm is force feeding down your gullet. FoMo anxiety will morph joyously into excitement. Choice paralysis will disintegrate, and real agency will resume. Try it – what have you got to lose?
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