Dealing With ‘Fear of Missing Out’ on Days Off.
I don’t use a lot of slang, especially internet slang, but there’s a term that I’ve heard a lot and I think it perfectly describes the current crisis social media is giving us.
FOMO: Fear of Missing Out. Picture this….you spent the weekend off from work with your television, two cats and a bucket of fried KFC chicken. You enjoyed it well enough, although hosing the grease off after was an annoyance, and when you’re snug in bed with Mitten and ready to sleep, you check your phone.
Stacey from work posted a three minute long snap story of an art and wine festival she went to with her fiancé Ryan. You don’t even like wine, or understand art, and you definitely don’t like Ryan, but suddenly you’re reevaluating everything you did on your weekend off. She looks beautiful and not like somebody who just ate a bucket of something that she isn’t sure was even chicken halfway through.
It doesn’t matter that you enjoyed it, and that you didn’t have anything else that you needed to do. Now you’re up for an hour wondering why you didn’t go do something more interesting before you’re stuck back at work for the rest of the week. And that’s exactly what’s happening to most of the population, as we’re being faced with endless knowledge about what our friends and strangers are doing at almost all moments of the day.
The worst thing about FOMO is that it doesn’t care if your other friends and coworkers spent the day doing the same thing as you. It’s not that you judge them for it, but you’re not going to compare yourself to them as much as you will Stacey. It’s messed up, sure, but that’s just how our minds work. You might even tell yourself that you’re being ridiculous, but if you spend enough time browsing social media and seeing the carefully curated tales of other’s week, you’ll be tempted to shave your head and move across the country on a whim.
The interesting thing is that in the older days, our lives were much simpler. It wasn’t uncommon to spend months on the farm doing the same routine and not traveling anywhere except the neighbors house to exchange some goods. However, a lot more people would say they felt content with their general lives than people nowadays, although they had it significantly worse. Of course…those dying of Cow Pox would disagree with being content, but I’m not talking about their happiness with all aspects of their lives. It’s just that routine was more accepted and it wasn’t easy to fake your whole day being all good angles, laughter and perfect scenery as social media allows us to.
Before social media, people did this to an extent with those vacation photo albums that they forced into their friends hands, but in general it didn’t make people jealous so much as bored. FOMO can be linked to low self esteem, depression, and even suicidal thoughts. Which is interesting considering it seems like such a small issue. Who cares if you get jealous sometimes of your friend Maria’s large family and frequent parties?
Does it matter that you rewatch Ryan’s snapchats sometimes to catch a glimpse of the house that’s way out of your paygrade? Sure, maybe Jessica is always out to lunch and clubbing while your sitting in the bathroom watching Youtube, but you’re only a little passive aggressive to her when you meet by the water cooler. And who cares if you photoshopped yourself into your cousin’s honeymoon photos just to see what it looked like if you were in Venice? And maybe-
Oh. Oh shit. FOMO strikes again. Nobody is immune even if some of us are affected by it to lesser degrees. It’s important to allow ourselves breaks from peering at other’s lives through the microscope that is social media. Social media can make the world seem more colorful and less bleak, but it can also make us think it’s colorful only for other people.
TO avoid FOMO, it’s important to listen to yourself. Do what you want to do, regardless of how other people choose to spend their time, and realize that living a life you don’t want just to make other people jealous is an awful waste of time. Influencers are some of the saddest and most boring people outside of the internet, because they spend their time making sure other people feel FOMO when they view their feed. They don’t spend that time actually enjoying life, just cataloguing it for others. I think that would be much worse than genuinely enjoying watching fail videos on Youtube for five hours with your cat.
Live the life you actually want. You only get one of them.
