FOMO Isn’t Just Making You Miserable, It’s Also Making You a Follower
Someday, when sociologists study the excesses of social media influencers, they will devote pages of scholarly research to one infamous weekend in April 2017. That’s when Fyre Festival, a can’t miss music event that promised to be “the best weekend of your life,” crashed onto our collective consciousness.
But instead of producing the biggest-FOMO inducing event of the year, Fyre Festival was a dumpster fire that provoked schadenfreude the world over. From the litter strewn festival ground, the “victims” of what has turned out to be massive fraud, tweeted with reckless abandon. Soon, pictures of the sad looking lunch boxes that were served in place of gourmet meals went viral. Then the internet freaked out and counterattacked. At a time when millions of people around the world are living in refugee camps, it’s hard to empathize when someone doesn’t like their cheese sandwich.
It’s also tough to feel bad for someone who was taken in by Fyre Festivals’ influencer-driven marketing scheme. According to a leaked investor pitch deck, the festival deployed a select group of social media personalities — dubbed Fyre Starters — to virally market the event to hundreds of millions of people. It worked. Led by Kendall Jenner (72.6 million followers), Emily Ratajkowski (13.3 million followers), and the Bellas (Hadid and Thorne, with a combined 25.5 million followers), the Fyre Starters reached over 300 million people, created considerable FOMO, and drove ticket sales. In exchange for pimping out their fans, these select influencers were compensated with free flights, luxury accommodations and other bespoke perks.
It can be a tricky business, “monetizing” your followers by promoting things for cash, but it’s nothing new. Famous people have been using FOMO to sell random junk for years, just ask George Foreman. They’ve also used FOMO to convince us to do stupid and harmful things. During the Golden Age of Hollywood, stars like John Wayne, Luci Arnaz, and Clark Gable were paid the equivalent of millions to glamorize cigarettes. So, in a sense, celebrity endorsements are as American as apple pie.
What has changed since then is not the influencers — it’s the way we follow them. The advent of social media has completely remade the relationship between celebrities and their followers. Influencers now feed us intimate snap shots of their lives, posting daily photos or videos from their homes or their vacations. They tell us about their families, their fears, and their favorite things. They expose their dark sides (and sometimes their backsides) through Twitter meltdowns (President Donald Trump, 33.7 million followers), Instagram feuds (Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez, combined over 200 million followers), or ill-advised bouts of revenge porn (Rob Kardashian, now banned from Instagram).
When you’re following all the glamour and the drama through a device that you carry around in your pocket, these posts can feel remarkably personal and, by extension, “authentic.” But they aren’t. The sad truth is that seeming genuine serves a clear commercial purpose. By convincing us that they are #authentic, influencers can appear genuine as they promote products, events, or other commercial ventures. Since we care about these people, their ups, their down, their kids, and their dogs, we are invested in them.
But they are not invested in us. Consider the influencers listed in this article: Taken together, this group has amassed more than 300 million followers, yet they collectively follow less than 3,000 people themselves. Celebrity, after all, is a one-way street, and celebrity-induced FOMO fest feels like a return to high school. That’s the place where you learned — the hard way — that blindly following the “popular” people is a terrible idea.
Remember that jock who tried to get you to drink too much at a party or that mean cheerleader who convinced you that your French teacher never took any showers? Well, when you graduated and went out into the wider world, you realized how terrible these people were. Then, you resolved to think for yourself so that by the time you went to your high school reunion, you asked yourself what you ever saw in those people in the first place. Why had you let them influence you so? Why hadn’t you listened when your mom told you the basic truism of being yourself and not being a follower: “If so-and-so jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?”
Every time you feel FOMO because Selena or Justin or Kim or Kendall is doing something that seems like it’s clearly better than what you’re doing, remember the following: This is not high school and being a follower basically sucks. Instead, ask yourself: If Gigi Hadid jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?
The only acceptable answer to that question is no.
Want to know if your FOMO’s going too far? Check out this blog post and, while you’re there, sign up for my newsletter for the latest on how to defeat it through 10% Entrepreneurship.
