It’s not FOMO. It’s Capitalism.
There are many feelings or sensations that we experience which appear so natural as to seem inherent to our very existence. Often times when these feelings or sensations arise, we will chide ourselves for having them and then push them aside or even to the forefront of our minds. One such feeling is jealousy (and its cousin, envy, can also be considered here). Jealousy that leads to the coveting of other people’s things or other people’s relationships is an idea that is so old even the Hebrew God himself warned against it in His commandments that were very helpfully struck into clay tablets for Moses. We often feel this feeling, without questioning what would happen if people did not have things to covet in the first place. Would we still be jealous?
In the zeitgeist today is the concept of “missing out,” which has been helpfully struck into the internet ether through the moniker of FOMO, the Fear Of Missing Out. When a person has something, goes somewhere, receives something, experiences something, witnesses something, or even does something so mundane as to eat food, it is today often “shared” widely through social media or more person-to-person through photos on a phone. The other person, the one seeing the image, may have an adverse reaction that we used to call jealousy, in which the immediate feeling is one of fear that they indeed may never get to have, touch, witness, or eat something ever again.
FOMO is not a new concept. It is the basis of all advertising and sales. It is at the foundation of the accumulation of things as a status symbol. It is also the foundation of status symbols themselves. Thousands of years ago, the very few rich elites were nearly deified while their subjects stood in awe and hoped to one day have some of those same riches. It was a slight evolution of basic human jealousy, which like all of our emotions has its roots in a simple biological function, like the need for food and shelter. It seems pretty simple to see that jealousy came from a place of early human beings seeing other, more comfortable human beings, and generating an emotion that would compel them to seek out that same comfort. Beyond basic needs of sustainability, there isn’t much reason from a biological perspective for people to be jealous.
FOMO has its roots in basic human jealousy, but it goes beyond jealousy to encompass the much more recent (historically speaking) act of conspicuous consumption. The “missing out” which FOMO refers to nearly always pertains to something that can be paid for. It follows, then, that the “fear” is in fact misplaced, because the only thing a person has to be afraid of is making the wrong decision about what to spend money on. This fear can be remedied by spending money, by purchasing something. The fix to the ailment is simple in our society: go out and buy.
The good news is that you don’t actually have FOMO. You are not afraid of missing out on anything. You are a capitalist. Capitalism is a system which requires FOMO to exist. The genius of the people behind this system is to then attach that requirement — a steady and ever-growing group of people who feel compelled to spend more money and have more things — to a basic human emotion, like jealousy, which was born of much simpler causes. In this formulation, everybody feels little twinges of jealousy from time to time. It is normalized, as is responding to it. Responding to it by spending money is the capitalist hope.
You don’t need very many things. You don’t need new stuff, more exciting stuff, more expensive stuff. You don’t actually need to visit every country in the world, you don’t need to see every concert. You don’t need too much to survive as an individual. Societies need a bit more to survive, and should have these basics provided to them. But interestingly, personal FOMO and feelings like it that capitalism manufactures out of thin air actually hinder societies from providing basic services to all of their members. In a very painful circle that has now played itself out for the entire history of capitalism, the deprivation experienced by some helps create the bounty experienced by others, causing the deprived to waste more resources in an attempt to secure their own bounty and thus ensuring that collectively the majority will continue to be deprived. Increased pooling and sharing of resources, which can be called something like “government” if other ideas make one queasy, can decrease the suffering of people. Capitalism’s apologists will point out that overall, the world is more prosperous now than ever and that poverty is on the decline. But they never consider the psychological damage of things like FOMO and all of the costs that are related to this kind of human damage. There is not a need for people to feel jealous, if they don’t feel that they need so many things. Why do we as a society want to create this kind of pain in our fellow human beings? As is often the case with capitalism, problems like this are usually approached from within the framework of the system itself and not from a place of imagining a different kind of world to live in. Each of us, in our minds, has a personal little world that we can use to experiment with different conditions and perhaps find better solutions. Not allowing that world to be hijacked by concepts like FOMO is merely one step in the right direction.
