FOMO, or the Fear Of Missing Out

Recently while listening to music, I was interrupted by a Twitter ad that went something like this, “Do you have FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out? With Twitter you can be a part of the action always and always stay up to date, so you never have to worry about FOMO again.” This initially struck me as a ridiculous ad. Not that I thought it wasn’t effective – I for a quick second felt a strange urge to check my virtually non-existent twitter feed after hearing it, but because it’s a bit like giving an opioid addict some morphine to put a quick, albeit temporary, end to his cravings. FOMO, a term now in the urban dictionary, is a real fear, or maybe it’s more of an anxiety, a persistent nagging type of fear that you can’t shake, like a bad itch.

A quick google search for FOMO in an attempt to find the original twitter ad yielded some slightly unexpected results: an article on Science Daily, FOMO: It’s your life you’re missing out on, another from TIME on how to overcome the fear of missing out. YouTube was the same, multiple videos of people discussing the fear – even a College Humor skit on it. Reading into this, I started to think of the first time I experienced this fear, or at least the pacification of it.

That created a feeling in me that I wasn’t alone, that I was connected to other people.

When I was in elementary school and used to have trouble sleeping, I have vivid memories of going to the living room, turning the TV on, and being lulled to sleep by the sound and light of it all. The television kept me company as I drifted off into sleep. How is this related to FOMO? Well the key was, for me, falling asleep to a movie on VHS didn’t have the same effect. It was cable television, the fact that cable was a live feed connected to multiple other homes, that created a feeling in me that I wasn’t alone, that I was connected to other people in a strange, electronic-collective-consciousness sense.

Today with the internet being so pervasive, I think the feeling is the same. The fear of missing out is not so much a fear that we will miss out on valuable information about current events. I think the fear of missing out is really a fear of being disconnected, a fear of loneliness and isolation. The irony of this is, of course, as research suggests (although it may depend on how you use it), that social media can make us feel even more lonely.

Today, even though I pride myself on only checking Facebook once a week, I still experience this feeling when I go to turn my phone on airplane mode. There’s always a voice in my head saying, “What happens if someone needs to call you. What if there’s an emergency?” These thoughts dissipate as soon as they are quashed by the physical action of pressing the airplane mode button, at which point I usually feel a bit of a relief due to the “weight” lifted off my shoulders.

Perhaps they became addicted to the fear of missing out.

This FOMO, got me thinking. If I feel this strange desire to be connected to the “electronic-collective-consciousness” we call the internet, it would not be hard to imagine an alternate prequel to the Matrix in which the citizens of the earth chose to “plug themselves in.” Perhaps they became addicted to the fear of missing out and, as the aforementioned opioid addict puts himself into a never ending euphoric coma by connecting himself to a continuous stream of morphine, decided to plug themselves into a never ending antidote for the fear of missing out by connecting to the “matrix.”

Maybe those on earth outside of the matrix are simply those too poor to ever have the chance to plug themselves in, or those who, perhaps courageously, chose the barren wasteland of a real earth over the facade of the matrix. Little did those that chose the matrix know that once there they might forget the real existence outside of it. So much so, that the feelings of isolation they once experienced began to manifest themselves again inside the matrix, and so, like the “dragon-chasing” opioid addict, the cycle continues, and inside new remedies for the feelings of isolation must be found.

“Today, computational absorption is an ideal.”

As Ian Bogost summed up nicely in his article You Are Already Living Inside a Computer in reference to “the pleasure of connectivity,”  “You don’t want to be offline. Why would you want your toaster or doorbell to suffer the same fate? Today, computational absorption is an ideal. The ultimate dream is to be online all the time, or at least connected to a computational machine of some kind.”

This is why we like having connected devices, and maybe this contributes to all the somewhat misguided enthusiasm surrounding the “Internet of Things.” Everyone wants everything connected, even if that means killing everyone on the planet. To take a bit of wisdom from Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, “we’re always asking if we can, but we never stop to think if we should.” Connectivity shouldn’t be an ideal. We’ve lived years without our refrigerators texting us when we get low on milk; there’s no reason to change that now. If there’s one thing cell phones have taught us, it’s that technological change is much easier to get used to than to get un-used to. Try going a couple of days unannounced without a cell phone, and one is likely to end up with several missing persons reports to their name. It’s no wonder the fear of missing out is worse than ever. So what do we do about it?

The fear of missing out is not useful.

The true “cure” for FOMO is to spend more time face-to-face and periodically take purposeful breaks from social media (real creative, I know, but sometimes the best advice isn’t anything new). As a bit of a rule, it is exactly the time when you feel the urge to check social media that is the time when you should avoid it. If you don’t, you risk reinforcing the reward pathways that probably created the fear in the first place. The fear of missing out is not at all useful and, rather than giving into it like as the Twitter ad suggests, we should do ourselves a favor and extinguish it in whichever way we can.