Deconstructing FOMO

Clarification: This is an opinion piece and not a factually researched article. Definitions and lines of reasoning presented herein are largely my own.

_

FOMO

/ˈfəʊməʊ/

noun 

anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may currently be happening elsewhere, often aroused by posts seen on social media.

_

FOMO, the Fear Of Missing Out, refers to the knowledge that an exciting or interesting event may currently be happening not involving one but involving one's counterparts that leads to an anxiety or fear of being deprived of the positive experiences that said counterparts or peers are encountering in the given moment. It is one of those weird phrases that has only entered the common lexicon in recent times, and not only already seems dated, but also has an implied negative connotation.

However, perhaps the aforementioned criteria are not enough to fully define the circumstances in which FOMO manifests itself. To illustrate, if a gazillionare builds a fleet of automated humanoid drones powered by arc reactors, colonises Mars and runs round trips to the moon every day in half a dozen companies that she has built after dropping out of college, you don't feel the same sense of FOMO than something relatively much more trivial, such as seeing your friends go out for dinner without you; you might feel envious if colonising Mars and the other things are some of your life ambitions that you have not yet managed to achieve and seeing someone else achieve them before you, but definitely you would not feel like you're missing out. Thus, it is evident that there are other currently undefined underlying factors that contribute to the FOMO experience.

For FOMO to be experienced, the interesting event in question needs to have occurred to a counterpart of similar life stage. In general, this refers to other persons of similar age group or educational and career standing. Some examples of persons who qualify to be of similar life stage as you would be your cohortmates and colleagues, but not your grandparents or senior teachers. The most common and defining measurement of life stage would thus be that of age.

This is because notwithstanding financial background and familial connections, the most common limiting factor to the experiences that the individual can access would be time. More things can be done in more time, thus person's who have had more time (ie are older) would hence have had more opportunities to do more things than a person with less (ie are younger). Time is the factor that forces us to have to decide what we want to do at any given moment by considering the opportunity costs of the actions in question.

Opportunity cost refers to the value of the next best alternative forgone when a choice is made. A choice must be made because of the problem of scarcity where the resource in question is time. This means that by having limited time, we must always choose what to do with the time where we can only realistically do one thing at one time (eg you cannot both be watching a movie in a theatre while eating dinner at the restaurant). In making a decision, we invariably sacrifice the value of the next best activity that we could be doing in that same time. 

The discussion of opportunity cost necessitates the consideration of value, because forgoing the value of the next best alternative implies the existence of a scheme for determining the value of an activity. People generally value and seek out positive experiences, where the factors that comprise a positive experience differ between individuals. An introvert who absolutely shuns social interaction might value a quiet afternoon at home with tea and a novel as more valuable than an outing with friends to the national parks, while a non-introvert (but not necessarily an extrovert) would prefer the converse. Hence, the introvert would not feel FOMO seeing his/her peers visit Gardens by the Bay one Sunday evening precisely because such an activity is not of higher valuation to them. Thus, it follows that we only feel FOMO if the "postive experience" shared by other people are those that we seek out, judged by our own criteria for what we prefer as opposed to societal expectations of what a positive experience refers to.

However, it is undeniable that every individual has different experiences, and it would be impossible for two distinct individuals to completely share every experience. Recognising this, it can be understood that we only feel the FOMO with shared experiences as opposed to individual experiences, such as a class outing as opposed to another individual's overseas travel. This explains why we feel a sense of missing out when we discover through social media that a group of classmates or friends goes out to the theme park for half a day without us, but not when they visit the theme park alone. FOMO is thus inherently an issue of the interpersonal social experience, and not the individual experience.

Reconciling with the gazillionare example mentioned previously, it would hence be plausible to conclude that we experience FOMO when persons of similar age experience positive events in the presence of other people who are sharing those experiences, and that we are willing to afford the opportunity cost to experience these events with them or other people, but haven't had the opportunity to. 

This is not to be confused with envy which refers to "the feeling of discontent or resentful longing aroused by someone else's possessions, qualities or luck", or jealousy which refers to the state of "feeling or showing an envious resentment of someone or their achievements, possessions or perceived advantages". The distinct difference between envy and jealousy is that that of envy is characteristically a feeling of longing, whereas jealousy entails the sense of inferiority; Feelings of jealousy encompass the perception that the target of your jealousy has robbed you of a unique experience, while envy relates to experiences that are non-excludable. For example, one can be envious of another's flair at music-making or creative writing where such traits are non-excludable in that one might be able to improve in these aspects with enough time and resources, but jealous at another girl or guy for dating your long-time crush which is an excludable experience that has deprived you of the same.

The difference between FOMO and envy and jealousy is that the latter two are individual experiences regarding another individual or singular entity, whereas FOMO relates to the interpersonal shared experience between distinct individuals relative to oneself. FOMO relates to the missing out of common shared experiences that you personally value, thus seeing your class go to Sentosa might trigger FOMO if you value that, whereas similar "feelings of missing out" caused by seeing your friend's cute cat should instead be attributed to envy.

It is thus not unexpected that social media is the most common source of our FOMO because the nature of such platforms encourages the sharing of positive experiences in a glamorous way, visually enhanced through filters and stickers. Moreover, because we usually Follow people in whom we are interested, including but not limited to our peers and friends, this results in a large percentage of these persons being of similar age group, qualifying any positive social experience that they share as possibly triggering our FOMO. Every time you swipe through your Instagram Stories or scroll through your Twitter feed, you will invariably encounter someone who is having more fun (according to your standards of fun) or being happier than you in the moment. The effect is intensified when you within 30 seconds encounter the same photo or Boomerang (or short video) from different people who had gone out together, as it reinforces the fact that it is a shared social experience that you are not party to.

The desired outcome of overcoming FOMO would be to accept that it's okay to not experience some things, but if you're already able to do that, then this entire piece would probably have been highly irrelevant to you because you have already personally been able to overcome FOMO, since acceptance of reality is the end goal of overcoming harsh truths.

The simple effective solution to defeating FOMO would be to destroy the biggest source of its triggers, which means to get off social media entirely and focus on yourself and your experiences, reducing your exposure to the knowledge of the shared experiences of others. Such avoidance is a valid and perfectly reasonable coping mechanism that might work effectively for you. But for the rest of us who want not to disconnect from the almost daily musings of our friends, we'll be moving on to the next paragraph.

The strategy of avoidance need not be so drastic as to uninstall everything, for we can explicitly Unfollow persons who tend to trigger our FOMO or give us associated negative feelings, or simply Mute their posts and updates if such functionality is available (eg Instagram - mute stories and/or posts). This allows us to keep in touch with our peers without disconnecting from our friends, thus maintaining the balance of consuming content that is relevant to us whilst avoiding that which triggers negative emotions, without completely shutting out the people with whom such experiences are associated. However, this is not foolproof for our closer friends might still share desirable experiences with their other friends without you - which is a perfectly reasonable occurrence, you self-centered prick, but admittedly might not feel good for a bit as well.

One of the key realizations that we must come to would be understanding that the cumulative time spent of those whom we follow far exceeds our own (ie 10 persons have 10 times the amount of time of 1 person ie you). This feeds the illusion that other people are experiencing so much more than you are, because we might instinctively classify the experiences into the categories of Mine and Not Mine. Thus, we must realise that experiences by other people that are not you should be seen in their own right as experiences of other individual individuals, and not a collective entity that isn't you. This takes the edge off the feeling that "everyone else is doing so much more than me", by recognising that "everyone else" comprises individuals who face the same scarcity of time as you, and have just chosen to forgo different alternatives to seek the best positive experience available to them in that moment.

This should be followed by a critical reflection of if you really value the activity experienced by the other person. Suppose a group of your classmates meet on a Saturday afternoon for fishing - Do you really like fishing? Do you feel comfortable fishing with them or will it be a stressful experience? Are there other activities that you'd rather be doing than fishing? Do you even know how to fish? 

Such analysis of the situation grounds our valuation of different experiences by looking past its perceived value (ie woah that looks really cool) to reveal its true value to us (eg "actually if I had joined them and done that, I would have been stressful and uncomfortable for the whole time"). We soon realise that in actuality, we only seek out a few specific experiences with specific people whose company we truly value, as opposed to the majority of experiences that are able to be had.

These realisations can be consolidated with an active appreciation for the experiences that you are party to. It is easy to get caught up in all the negativity that's going on and forget about the good things that happen to you, the positive experiences that you go through, as well as the factors that are within your control. Seeking positive experiences is inherently a negative experience, whose antidote is recognising and appreciating the positive occurrences that you have had the privilege to experience. Moreover, if we do feel a deficiency in such positive experiences, given that for most of us there's only a few specific people with whom we are truly comfortable, you should be close enough to them to be able to plan something together to go somewhere and do something - and if you're not, then maybe those are not the people with whom you should be spending time with and on and in the first place anyway.

Only through active appreciation, reflection and the realization of the aforementioned can we start to realise that perhaps there's actually nothing much to fear missing out, for everyone is constantly missing out on something - most of the things that we thought that we were "missing out" on in the first place are probably not even things that we actually want to do anyway, which then means that maybe, in the end, we aren't actually missing out on that much after all.