F*** FOMO

To those of you who do not speak ‘Milennialese,’ FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) is an epidemic (the other epidemic) that plagues today’s climate, fed and funnelled by Social Media. The concept is a simple one; (as mentioned in my last post) wherever you are in the world, there’s always something better happening, or another person allegedly doing something that is far more awesome than we could ever comprehend.

On social media, we are inundated and bombarded by the Awesome and Unattainable, the Terrifying and the Obscene. We start believing that we are not enough, that we should be doing more, causing an anxiety gap between our current self and the one we hope to be but aren’t. If you think about it, life on a routine basis is pretty damn average; one could say for the majority of it, can be quite boring, or just plain simple (particularly if one is quarantining!). Can we initiate our efforts to maximising its potential? Of course! But how often do we? That’s just how it is! We need those ebbs as much as we need those flows.

How can anything feasibly be meaningful to us if we continuously lived in the extremes of life? From one extreme spectrum to the other, we’re not grieving over loved ones every day, nor do we have the absolute time of our lives every day. No. That does not happen, as much as celebrities with their filtered accounts may have you believing. No one’s life can be an all-out big party 24–7 365 days of the year!

Not only that, this aforementioned anxiety gap can create a groundswell of resentment and jealousy that even the healthiest of egos would struggle to deal with.

By affecting people’s expectations, social media has made everything warped. Don’t get me wrong, it has its advantages, but on the darker side of it, it can turn us into social vampires. Whether allowing our insecurities to run rampant on us, or unceremoniously falling in a desperate pit for validation, projecting your worth anywhere that is not within you, can literally suck the life out of you.

All around the world, people are chasing highs or extremes that defy the ‘mundane middle ground’ that life typically is at its core. Pleasure and its opposite counterpart despair has no ceiling, and we humans are more than capable of finding a way to up the ante on both, at our own expense.

Whether we care to admit it we yearn for something to shake our world, to truly make us feel alive. Adrenaline junkies do so with jaw-dropping feats of daredevilry, others find them in state-altering substances, while a genocidal few choose innocent victim to enact a feeling of worth at the expense of others, paraphrasing Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a **** .

Do not let social media fool you. The single most attractive aspect about it is its consumers’ ability to choose how they want to be perceived. They are in control- their profiles, their rules. In a game of cards, Life does not guarantee such a hand.

When you succumb to the FOMO vibe of social media, know you are playing its game, a comparable game at that, that stacks you up against others. Contrary to popular belief, your primary focus isn’t on yourself, it’s on others! The old saying of ‘Stay in your lane’ seems appropriate in this case.

Stop looking for an external world to tell you who you are, what you are about and what you should feel.

‘Energy is currency’. Double down your energies on you. Make sure you don’t give it away haplessly.

You are the proprietor of your own worth and no one else.