The Unmanageable FOMO and its Prevention.

Yesterday your friend posted a picture and wrote a caption, “Enjoying my vacation with my school friends in Hawaii”. You are one of those school friends but you couldn’t make it to go with them.

Now how would you feel? Sad, lonely, unwanted, not accepted by society? Well, you might feel left out and you will soon want to go on a vacation with your other friends. But why so? Because you need a break? Do you want to spend time with your friends? Or is it just because you want to show that you also can go for a tour, you too have money and friends and you’re very happy, on social media?

Let me guess, it’s the third reason, right? Why though?

This is the Fear Of Missing Out. You saw some of your friends chilling together on a beach and now you’re wanting to do the same because your mind says, “If you don’t do this, people would think that you have no friends or no money, you would not fit into society".

Now hey, listen to me. There’s nothing wrong with your mind. You’re not the only one who has gotten triggered by looking at those vacation pictures of your social media friend. The FOMO happens with everyone.

We look at the highlights of people’s lives and think that they’re living the happiest and dreamy life. But “Social Media” is not the real world. Our minds are hacked and it constantly keeps comparing our life with everybody out there.

Someone has a lot of knowledge about politics and you know nothing, somebody else has a very good command of technology and you have Zero information about it. Somebody else has a great interest in watching football and you have no interest in any sport. Now our mind wants to tell us that we must know about all those things because otherwise, we won’t be able to survive on the internet. We think that we need to be updated about everything and must know every detail about it. But is it possible? Is it really necessary? We will get the answers to these questions very soon.

We have 24 hours in a day, we need a good amount of sleep, we need food, we need work breaks, we need to travel from our homes to the office or school and vice versa, we need to study, we need to spend time with our families. Also, we need to read the news to be updated about at least the headlines. This is our everyday routine. How can we manage to know about every other thing happening on the internet?

We have so many friends online and offline. Each friend has different interests and opinions, and we try to fit in with every one of them. We develop different personalities among different people. We develop different perceptions regarding the same thing. All these perceptions and personalities get mixed up and it confuses our mind. This leads to forgetting our own identity.

In the race of knowing about everything and the FOMO, we are losing ourselves.

Even your friends posting their opinions regarding different things have done it due to their FOMO. You would also like to do it and this cycle continues.

The fear of missing out can lead you to miss out on something even greater: the life that you truly desire.

~Aili Kuutan

Let’s understand through another example. You have subscribed to a YouTube channel that uploads content regarding daily news and the greatest events happening. You consume the information daily.

One of your friends follows another YouTube channel and tells you a very different statement regarding the same thing. Now you will doubt if the content that you’re watching is useful or not. It will keep on going like this.

Now listen to me, every creator has a different opinion and a different way of expressing it. The more creators you watch, the more your brain will doubt and the more it will get confused. Ultimately this leads to a confused mind and a confused lifestyle. If we keep following one person for one type of content, it will be enough for us to be updated.

This FOMO is proving to be dangerous for self-growth. With constant comparison, we are degrading ourselves as a hopeless and uninformed human beings.

This needs to stop somewhere. But we have access to the internet 24/7. How do we even stop ourselves not looking into someone’s life?

Let’s find out some ways to prevent our FOMOs.

1. Social Media is not the Ultimate Truth.

We need to understand that nobody would ever want to show people the sad part of their lives. We won’t like to post ourselves crying. We want validation from people. If we buy a new outfit, we will take a picture and post it, just for validation that the outfit is great. If we go to a party, we must post about it just for validation that we are party animals and we are fun to hang out with.

This validation is not necessary at all. Stop thinking that social media and validation are your whole life. We have a life outside of social media, which is the real world and it is different.

2. It’s not necessary to know about everything.

We all have different interests and different goals in our lives. Some of us might want to be a lawyer, doctors, an entrepreneur, software developers or writers or anything else. So all we need to know about are the things that are important for our goals, our careers, our lives, that’s it. A software developer must know how to code, how to make a website, programming languages and stuff. It will be okay if they don’t know about medicines and medical sciences. It won’t make their lives hard.

Just feed your brain with the things that are important to you.

3. Stop worrying.

You don’t need to worry about missing any news. If anything big happens, you will get to know about it automatically. Big events, accidents, crimes, and disasters are reported everywhere and every media wants to note it. Those things are bombarded on your feed.

So you won’t miss out on anything big that happens.

That’s it, FOMO happens with every one of us. It is simple to get away from it. We are in this together and we got this.

Remember it’s your life, it could be inspired but it should not be influenced by anyone.