THIS IS WHY THE FEAR OF MISSING OUT (F.O.M.O) IS NOT REAL
YOLO is the new cool and FOMO is the new fear amongst teens and adults— Edna Akinwande (#ARQ).
There is nothing, absolutely nothing called the Fear Of Missing Out. Before you burn me at the stake, read on to know why.
To put it in perspective, imagine this:
The biggest party is to hold in a few days. Yourself and your friends have shopped for it. Few hours to the time to leave for the party, you begin to feel sick and you throw up a couple of times. Your mom says you can’t go because you need to get treated.Your friends go ahead without you because you are ill. But you can’t help but imagine how what is going on at the party. You begin to see Snapchat stories of your friends having fun. You would begin to feel unloved and excluded from happenings.
Or that very gush of disappointment and exclusion that overwhelms you when you meet your buddies and they say, “Yo! You totally missed out from the best party ever. It was lit 🔥”, is where the Fear-Of-Missing-Out starts from.
For the 21st century generation that is more digitally savvy, we hear talks about how a hashtag is trending on Twitter or which influencer was slapped by a celebrity.
The weekend where talks about the COZA scandal, Nigeria playing Mozambique at the AFCON 2019 and #BBNaija kickoff trended, I can outrightly say that I was almost on my phone round the clock. What a crazy weekend. Whew!
These and many more are things that inform our apprehension or anxiety in order not to miss out from the ‘happenings of life’.
In the words of a British psychologist at the University of Essex, Andrew Przybylski;
FOMO is a pervasive apprehension that you have thinking others might be having rewarding experiences if you are absent.
Therefore, in the place of satisfying our dire desires, we continually fail to ask ourselves this daring but necessary questions:
1. What exactly do you think you may be missing out from?
2. Why desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing?
3. Why wait for an opportunity that you are most likely unprepared for?
4. And if you were prepared, are all opportunities, events or happenings meant for your participation?
In the book of Genesis 2, God said, ‘…Let us make man in OUR image and in OUR likeness…’
God was particular about having a feeling of belongingness and inclusion. He wanted to have people like him in order to be in their lives and sorta be updated.
Also in Genesis 4 verse 2 — 9, Cain didn’t kill his brother because his sacrifice of offering was rejected but because he felt unloved, unwanted and other -un- by God.
P.S: Don’t hurt anyone and come to justify it o. The Popo won’t take it easy on you.
According to Abraham Maslow, there are 5 stages of needs and the 3rd stage is a psychological motivation for human behavior which is- The need for social relatedness and belonging.
This is to say that the constant desire to feel among, or always wanting to be informed about your friends is totally natural and embedded in you, but being constantly hooked on social media to satisfy this urge is where the problem starts.
Tech Insider, a category of Business Insider carried out a social research about F.O.M.O. The experiment was carried out by Emma Fierberg who decided to quit social media for a month after watching a TED talk on quit social media by Cal Newport.
Emma said, before the experiment started, that she thinks she would miss out on her friends using Facebook to send out birthday party invitations or promoting their music shows.
The first few days away from social media, she had withdrawal symptoms of addictive thumb swiping and constantly checking her phone for notifications. But she got cured of this after a week.
This was her verdict after some weeks:
1. She wakes up feeling more rested, no headaches or tiredness.
2. She began to feel like there were extra hours in the day for her to do other things like reading, cooking or exercising.
3. She got more productive at work because now she doesn’t have to switch from one work tab to another social media tab on her computer at intervals.
4. Her mind is clearer and her wellbeing has improved.
5. She is learning how to properly communicate in a world outside the social media and she has more time for her thoughts now.
6. Emma claims that F.O.M.O isn’t real if you don’t know what you are missing out on. She isn’t feeling like she missed out on anything because she isn’t seeing it.
Emma is still happily off social media to this day.
A proverb says;
What you don’t know can’t hurt you.
This is one hell of a ridiculous statement used by people to justify their misdeeds. However, that statement works for this context because F.O.M.O is not real to you as an individual, if you are not aware of whatever you may be missing out on.
Stay with me. Let me explain a little bit further.
F.O.M.O is defined as the fear of missing out on an opportunity for social interaction, a novel experience, a profitable investment, or other satisfying events.
Nomophobia is a proposed name for the phobia/fear of being out of cellular phone contact, F.O.M.O is also a social phobia of missing out on something.
Which means that FEAR is the common factor here. Therefore, there is a need to analyze the word — FEAR.
According to College of Medicine at the University of Ibadan, Fear is an unpleasant feeling triggered by the PERCEPTION of danger, either real or imagined.
But the question now is, what informs your fear, what feeds your fear or how does fear come to play?
Let’s use a little bit of science to explain my point better. Come with me.
Fear is a chain reaction in the brain that starts with a stressful stimulus and ends with the release of chemicals that cause a racing heart, fast breathing and energized muscles, also known as the fight-or-flight response.
Biology class taught me that the brain is a profoundly complex organ that comprises of more than 100 billion nerve that responds to communications which starts from everything we sense, perceive, think and do.
To say this in simpler terms, you are free from fear if your brain doesn’t receive any communication based on what you see, feel, smell, taste, perceive, think, hear or even imagine.
A blind man cannot be scared of the dark because he can’t see that it is dark on the street. You also can’t be scared of missing out on anything, if you are not aware of any of those things you think you are missing out on.
Take for example: I am in my house on a Friday night, watching Netflix and sipping from a glass of red wine. However, my besties are at party around the block and I had no idea about it. Didn’t see any post about it, didn’t get any invite, knows absolutely nothing about it.
Do you think I would be worried about an event that I am not even aware about in the first place? Do you think I would be anxious that I am missing out on something?
Of course not, I can’t be anxious because I FREAKING HAVE NO IDEA ABOUT IT, so there is nothing in my line of imagination to begin to worry about.
F.O.M.O is informed by what your mind feeds on, by what you see on your social media feeds, snaps, insta-stories, party invites and a host of other content on the internet.
So your fear of missing out is heightened or lessened based on what you consume which is usually visual in the case of social media. It is only a perception that you are missing out. You only think you are missing out because fear is triggered by a perception which can either be an irrational perception or a rational one.
F.O.M.O cease to be real to anyone that guards and sensitize their social media feeds and Time Line, guard what they see, smell, hear, feel, taste, think or even imagine.
Nevertheless, we are humans and we can get carried away by activities and be caught in the web of F.O.M.O.
A number of use are still living in fear of missing out because we haven’t learnt that what we don’t see, hear or know doesn’t hurt us.
For those of us that are still living in the fear of missing out, F.O.M.O does this to us.
F.O.M.O: here are it’s psychological effects on your well-being
- Extreme dissatisfaction with one’s life based on what you see about other people’s life.
- Loneliness, stress, loss of sleep (Twitter addicts come and form a queue here)
- Reduced self-esteem and depression
- Extreme social anxiety
- Low productivity because you always focus on what doesn’t add to your life.
- Loss sense of identity all in the bid to fit the status quo, you begin to live a lie.
Social media is a powerful tool for staying connected in the modern world. However, it only gives us a window view into people’s lives and physical interaction shouldn’t be overlooked.
We always forget to remember to tap out and understand that what we think we are loosing out from is just the trailer.
“Social media only gives you the official trailer of a person’s life not the real life content. Why drool over the trailer when you can watch the real film through physical interaction?” — Edna Akinwande (#ARQ).
How do you tap out from FOMO?
- Have a mobile phone or social media detoxification or fasting: this helps you to clear your system of every bad energy already gathered. Helps you to sit and think straight about a definite purpose for your phone or access to social media in the first place.
- Create more room for face-to-face interaction: don’t not only enjoy watching the trailer of a person’s life i.e all of their good times and high points of your virtual friend’s life but rather enjoy the movie itself through physical communication.
3. Be appreciative of what you have and be content: your mind retains what you see on the internet and it can propel you to begin to pursue the shadows of life.
It takes only one glance to end up in a spiral of a 2 hours unplanned social media scan-through, and it takes only a look away from distractions to be more productive in life.
The more you go after every opportunity you come across, the less likely you are to achieve anything- Unknown
