Why Traveling, It Turns Out, Is Fundamentally FOMO Free

The week before I left to study abroad in Copenhagen for the semester, everyone kept asking me how I was feeling. Was I excited? Nervous? A mixture of the two my stomach couldn’t always tell apart?

Honestly? I felt neither. I had been excited, I had been nervous, I had flung wildly between the two. But that was all the semester leading up to me leaving. But, instead, the week before I left I felt very young. Impatient and full of FOMO.

A few days after I arrived in Copenhagen, my host mom, Gitte, asked me if I missed my parents, if I had been skyping with them. No, I tried to explain. I’d just been with my parents for a month while their lives were full and I had nothing to do.

By the time I left, all I wanted was to get out of there, get off of break, go back to having things to do. I’d talked about going abroad for so long, months and months and months, that I thought it just needed to hurry up and get here already. I was sick of talking about Europe, I wanted to go experience Europe.

Actually though, I wasn’t just sick of talking about Europe, I was a little bit scared to keep talking about Europe. FOMO. Fear of missing out. I wasn’t incredibly worried about missing things at home (although I was, and am still, a little worried about that). But I was more worried about missing things abroad. There’s just so much to do in Europe and no possible way to do all of it.

Yes, that is also true about life in general. There is no way to do everything. But I don’t feel quite the same need to squeeze experience out of my life the way I felt I had to squeeze it out of traveling.

No one has ever told me that life is “the experience of a lifetime!” Even though, you know, by definition it really is. The experience of a lifetime.

But that’s what everyone said about Europe, as they recommended me things in bubbly, excited voices. Oh shit! I would think, I am never going to be able to fit it all in!

Taking the train home from Milwaukee over break, I sat across from a girl who looked like me. Not in face, but in form. She had long dark hair, big brown eyes, a petite frame. I do not. But she had my glasses — black, square, a bit too big for her face. Thrift store jeans and beat up black boots. Headphones and a sweater. She pulled a guidebook out of her bag — Argentina. I looked at her and felt a mixture of things. She made me want to leave, to go to Europe, to go to Argentina, to Istanbul, Calcutta.

I couldn’t help myself — seeing her, with her book, made my stomach tighten. Because I wanted to go Argentina. I have yet to run into a place I don’t want to see for myself. But Argentina is higher on my list than most. But I’m not going. At least not anytime soon. Of course, I’m doing other things, plenty of other things — I’m going to Europe for God’s sake!

But still. This girl, whoever she is, is going to Argentina. And on the train I was thinking– someday she may write about going to Argentina. I’ll read it — maybe. And I’ll have either been to Argentina or I won’t have. If I haven’t, I’ll imagine what her trip was like, what she did, what she saw. What her experiences were. And if I have been to Argentina, well, I’ll do the exact same thing.

Gillian Flynn explained this horrible, comparative, FOMO phenomena better than anyone in Gone Girl.

It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can’t recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn’t immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I’ve literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore. I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.

It’s the lament of the millennial. Seeeeeen it. And even when you see something that you haven’t seen before, someone else saw it first and their second hand experience is better. Don’t you hate it and love it when something really depressing in a book rings true?

The first time I read that quote, though, one experience popped out to me as being fundamentally FOMO free. Immune.

Falling in love. Falling in love is probably the most discussed topic in human history — think of the books, the movies, the TV shows, the songs. Even when falling in love isn’t the main point, it’s a subplot or a reference. More so than anything else, you’ve already seeeeen people fall in love.

And when it happens to you, it’s nothing like that and it’s everything like that. You have seen all the others, but you don’t care. Their second hand experience cannot be compared. When we fall in love, it’s without the crowd.

I’ve been in Copenhagen one week. And already I can tell you, my fears and worries and jealousies about Argentina Girl (and all the other Guidebook Girls who dress like I do) are patently ridiculous. Traveling is like falling in love. You can read about others doing it, see it, hear about it. You don’t get to do everything. But what you do get to do, or at least what I’ve done so far, is so special, so mine that the secondhand experience doesn’t even compare. It’s fundamentally FOMO free. Immune.