Content Consumption FOMO

In a time when it feels like content is being thrown at us from every which way, how do we choose what to focus on?

Have you ever heard of the word FOMO? Which stands for “Fear of Missing Out?”

Chances are, even if you haven’t heard of it, you’ve probably experienced it. It is the feeling you get when all of your friends are going out, and you really desperately just want to stay in with your fuzzy socks on, curled up next to your dog while you watch an entire season of some show on Netflix, but you also know that if you stay home you’ll spend a lot of time wondering what is happening with your friends and what you’re missing. It’s the feeling you get when you think nothing fun is going on and then you check your Snapchat and see a ton of Snapchat stories of people having The Best Time Ever (and I capitalized that because I am less and less under the false presumption that these people are actually having the best time ever. I’ve realized that when I’m actually having a great time, I am much less likely to be posting about it on Snapchat. But that’s a discussion for another day.)

The term FOMO is often used in relation to social situations, but I think it is a feeling that can easily permeate all aspects of life. Consider, for example, when you go on vacation. While some people are perfectly happy to use their vacation as a time to purely relax and are less concerned with packing the time with activities, others find themselves stressed by all of the options of what they could do, and how they will pack it into such a short period of time. This person will feel a lot of stress in creating an itinerary, often worrying that choosing to forego one activity for another may be a big mistake that could ruin the entire trip.

Or consider a shopping trip. Yes, this includes online shopping, where FOMO is greatly exacerbated by the endless amount of purchasing options. Many times I will find myself going to shop with the goal of buying one specific thing. Then, I find seven versions in 193 different colors, and I get so stressed that I end up leaving empty handed. The shopping version of FOMO actually has its own name- psychologist Barry Schwartz calls it the Paradox of Choice.

The area of my life where I’ve been feeling the most pressure from FOMO lately is in content consumption- TV shows, music, film, books, etc. Either this is a phenomenon that is felt by a lot of other people, or it simply sheds light on where I’m at in my life socially and emotionally. I’m just going to hope its the former. The easiest way to understand my content consumption FOMO is to observe me literally anytime I try to watch something on Netflix. Unless I am in the middle of a crazed binge, I am always trying to decide what to watch next. And what happens a majority of the time is that I scroll through Netflix and its wide array of options. If something catches my interest, I google it to see what the ratings and reviews are, then keep it in the back of my mind if it seems good, and continue searching. I do this about 20 times, until I have about 20 different alleged good shows or movies to watch. Then, I’m tasked with making the decision of what to actually watch. I try to narrow down my choices to a few, and sometimes, I even make it to the point of settling on one to watch.

But then, when I press play and start to settle in to watch the program, I get so quickly distracted. Either I have built up my expectations so high that the first minute or two of the movie fails to absolutely capture me, and I get disappointed. Or I continue to wonder if the other programs that I decided not to watch are possibly better than this one. Or I get distracted by something else, on the internet, or on my phone, or in my buzzing mind.

This happens with more than just Netflix- I find myself struggling to settle on everything from what book to read, to what music/song to listen to, to which article to read. Believe me, I know that this, in the grand scheme of things, is not a huge problem. If, over the course of a day, my biggest struggle is getting anxiety trying to figure out what to watch on Netflix, I know I’ve got it pretty good.

Still, I don’t like the way this makes me feel. I get anxious trying to choose what to consume, and I end up consuming either nothing, or just tiny bits of a lot of things. And I’m left unsatisfied. Then, I get down on myself for not being able to be more decisive, or not being able to focus long enough to finish something. The same thing happens when I try to make my day as productive as possible- I think of all the different things I can and should do, and then try to decipher which one to tackle first. Doing that gives me so much stress that I either procrastinate the actual productivity, or I do nothing at all.

I wish it was easier to simply snap out of it, snap my fingers, and be more focused on something without fearing what I might be missing out on. But I do think it is possible to be better. And I know that it is going to take work. In this day and age, it feels more and more like things are coming at me- at all of us- from every direction. Log onto Facebook and you’re immediately confronted with an excessive amount of things to click on. If you’re anything like me, mindlessly opening an app can turn into a vortex that sucks time away and leaves you wondering what you’ve even been looking at for the past 20 minutes.

I’m sure different tactics will work for everybody, but I’m making it my personal goal to disconnect a bit more. I don’t want to stop consuming- I’ll never stop being hungry for news, for music, for words, for ideas, and for thoughts. But I want to consume better. So I’m making it my goal to be more focused and present, and go more in depth. One way that I’ve been able to do this is reading- I got a kindle for Christmas, and vowed to myself that I would earnestly try to read a book every week. While it has been a little bit hard to do so with work picking back up, in the first two days after Christmas, I inhaled two books. And I felt awesome. Since then, I’ve read several books. Instead of watching TV after dinner, I’ll sit back and read a book for an hour. And I find myself getting less and less distracted, or tempted to check my phone. In fact, I keep my phone away from me, and use that time to be focused on reading and reading only.

Over time, I hope to apply this focused consumption to more and more mediums. Not only does this help me to have a better appreciation and experience with whatever it is that I’m consuming, but it also helps me to have more productive days overall. Because my consumption is focused and targeted, it takes less time. I spend an hour reading, instead of wasting 20 minutes on Facebook and 20 minutes trying to decide what to watch on Netflix, and 20 minutes trying to figure out what new music is worth listening to, and 20 minutes reading the first paragraph of 15 different blog posts but not being able to commit to finishing even one.

If you’ve managed to make it to the end of this long-winded piece, you might have less of a problem with FOMO than I do, and I’m impressed. But if what I’ve said resonates with you even a little bit, I hope that you’ll join me in this effort to be a better consumer. And I also hope that you’ll share your own techniques and experiences with me.