As serendipity often strikes randomly, I was reading an article in The New York Times by Jenna Wortham the other day at the same time I was reading the chapter in Sherry Turkle’s new book, Alone Together about people who fear they are missing out.
The fear of missing out (FOMO) has become pervasive in society. Teens and adults text while driving, because the possibility of a social connection is more important than their own lives (and the lives of others). They interrupt one call to take another, even when they don’t know who’s on the other line (but to be honest, we’ve been doing this for years before caller ID). They check their Twitter stream while on a date, because something more interesting or entertaining just might be happening.
It’s not “interruption,” they claim, it’s connection. But wait a minute… it’s not really “connection” either. It’s the potential for simply a different connection. It may be better, it may be worse — we just don’t know until we check.
We are so connected with one another through our Twitter streams, Instagram updates, and Foursquare check-ins, through our Facebook and LinkedIn updates, that we can’t just be alone anymore. The fear of missing out (FOMO) — on something more fun, on a social date that might just happen on the spur of the moment — is so intense, even when we’ve decided to disconnect, we still connect just once more, just to make sure.
Like the old-school Crackberry addict, we’re now all in the grip of “FOMO addiction” * — the fear of missing out on something or someone more interesting, exciting or better than what we’re currently doing.
The Fear of Missing Out
Connected to this fear of missing out on something better that’s going on without you are these fake personas we promote on websites like Facebook. I say “fake” because we often present only the best side of our lives on social networking sites. After all, who wants to be “friends” with someone who’s always posting depressing status updates and who seems to be doing nothing interesting in their lives?
So they are indeed fake, because instead of us being completely real, many (most?) of us censor what we post to our social media profile these days. The people on Facebook are often simply their idealized selves — with a bit of misery thrown in from time to time to “keep it real.”
A friend who works in advertising told me that she felt fine about her life — until she opened Facebook. “Then I’m thinking, ‘I am 28, with three roommates, and oh, it looks like you have a precious baby and a mortgage,’ ” she said. “And then I wanna die.”
On those occasions, she said, her knee-jerk reaction is often to post an account of a cool thing she has done, or to upload a particularly fun picture from her weekend. This may make her feel better — but it can generate FOMO in another unsuspecting person.
Or as Sherry Turkle notes,
“Sometimes you don’t have time for your friends except if they’re online,” is a common complaint. […]
When is downtime, when is stillness? The text-driven world of rapid response does not make self-reflection impossible, but does little to cultivate it.
Turkle’s descriptions of some of the teens who’ve told her their story is downright scary. Teens who believe they need to be available 24/7 to their friends, because, you know, someone might get dumped or into an argument with their parents. They need instant gratification and solace. Nobody can wait anymore — not because they can’t — but because they don’t need to.
After all, if you could eat all the ice cream sundaes in the world without any serious repercussions (like weight gain or being sick), why wouldn’t you? That’s how many of us our nowadays ingesting social media and technology — taking in as much as we can, simply because we think we can.
But it’s a lie we’re telling ourselves. Humans weren’t built this way.
Can There Be Balance with FOMO?
Turkle nails it on the head with this comment in the article:
“In a way, there’s an immaturity to our relationship with technology,” she said. “It’s still evolving.”
I think that succinctly summarizes the problem — our relationship with technology is still in its infancy, and we’re still feeling our ways around it. We don’t quite know how to interact well — mindfully, meaningfully — with it. Count how many times you check your email or smartphone for messages, texts, status updates, etc. in a day. 10? 100? 1,000 or more? You may be surprised.
Technology that we’re at one with and that promotes social balance and harmony wouldn’t require such obsessive checking behavior, would it? It would understand and complement natural human social behavior. It would differentiate for us what’s important and what’s not (the idea of “smart agents” from a decade ago still resonates).
Teens think they “get it” — that technology is a natural extension of their social lives. But they’re mistaken — they’re still crafting their lives around the technology and the social connections they entice us with, rather than the other way around. They stay up all night waiting for the next status update. They interrupt a face-to-face conversation to make sure whatever’s going on elsewhere isn’t better. I wonder how this is a good way to promote future, strong social connections?
I have my doubts.
Facebook & Others Promote FOMO
I believe, much to their detriment, that the makers of social networking technologies have some rough idea — but not in any nuanced or scientific way — how the tools and products they create are changing human behavior. ((If these companies really wanted to take their efforts to the next stage, they should consider hiring some psychologists!)) It’s an impulse control problem — we cannot easily control our impulse to “check” the technology to ensure something “more important” isn’t waiting our immediate attention.
But the more you check Facebook, the happier Facebook is. It is actually a feature that its users are gripped by FOMO, because it drives more people to use Facebook more often. So they can show you more ads and make more money. Nice, right?
The reality is that there are few things so truly important in life, they can’t wait. Sure, I understand it if you’re the President of the United States — you have a legitimate reason to check your texts during dinner. But everyone else, not so much. We’re succumbing to our FOMO when we do so.
Fear of missing out (FOMO) is a very real feeling that’s starting to permeate through our social relationships. The question is — will we ever settle for what we have, rather than cling to the fear that we may be missing out on something better? Social media like Facebook and Twitter are making this increasingly more difficult.
Read the full article: How Social Media Can Induce Feelings of ‘Missing Out’
FOMO Can Also Lead To Depression. Read Below For More Information About Depression:
* – I use the word “addiction” here firmly tongue in cheek, to emphasize how extreme some of these behaviors can be. I do not believe in FOMO addiction any more than I believe in Internet addiction.
Photo by hkarau.
21 comments
Love this post. I hope that even kids will get tired of divided attention and start regulating their technology use. We’re all giddy right now. I am only just realizing–in a profound way–how peaceful it is to pay attention to only one thing at a time sometimes. I realize we get worse at multitasking as we age, but it’s even more than that. It’s like stepping away from a chattering cocktail party to a quiet room. I’m still wired more often than not, but I’m striving for balance.
(If these companies really wanted to take their efforts to the next stage, they should consider hiring some psychologists!)
That’s a great idea.
FB has an “in-house sociologist,” guy named Cameron Marlow, who has a Ph.D. from MIT in “media cognition and weblogs.” His research appears to be less about how Facebook affects social interactions in the real world than about how we use Facebook and correlations between our Facebook use and who we are.
Hello,
I had read an article about FOMO many years ago. The term was coined by Dr Dan Herman. He is talking about it from a marketer’s point of vew. Very interesting stuff.
Quite a useful set of observations. What this article is hinting at, but not making explicit is the affect of social networking and texting technology on the development of emotional and social intelligence. A whole generation has grown up thinking it’s normal to not be particularly present during a face to face conversation. This is a form of being made socially stupider by the new technologies (in the service, of course, of the companies that promote it)…all the while thinking that somehow you’re actually more connected. When it comes to humanity and stupidity, you can’t keep up.
i completely agree with you! far too many times i’ve attempted to have a conversation with someone whose eyes are simply glued to their phone, and they just cannot focus on what’s happening right in front of their face. this “FOMO” makes people so afraid of what they COULD be missing that they pay no attention to what they actually ARE missing- their actual life.
cell phones are practically breeding teenagers to ignore what’s right in front of their face, and they’re becoming more and more uncomfortable with human interaction and more accustomed to conversing digitally, impersonally, so much so that when they do have human interaction it’s either interrupted constantly with pauses to read and respond to a text, or just so awkward that it’s avoided in general, at all costs.
now don’t get me wrong, not all teenagers/cell phone users are dysfunctional… i’m simply speaking of the more severe cases of “FOMO”.
Funny thing is that I had to post this to facebook.
Facebook in it’s self is far from being social.
Social means meeting people and getting to know them, facebook however is finding people you know and sharing funny things with them and excluding people you do not know.
Oh I would have to agree and disagree to an extent. While some use it to only connect in a limited form, many use it to be social in the context that you imply. For specific examples, collecting groups and music communities on Facebook. In both areas I often engage socially with strangers and end up meeting new people and getting to know them by attending events that bring us all together.
As someone who teaches business etiquette this is an increasing problem in the workplace. When employees feel the need to constantly check-in, they send the message that what “just came in is more important than our conversation right now.”I agree that we should not be so addicted to staying connected 24/7.
I think the problem of the book Alone Together is that it mistakes a symptom for the cause. People’s real world social relationships aren’t suffering from too much social media. Rather, the whole reason social media thrives in the first place is because our real world social relationships are suffering and have been for a while now.
I agree, made up diagnosis for a made up condition. It’s time we stopped making psychopathology out of every fad
I’m a teenager myself (15 yrs old) and I found this really interesting. Even though I don’t have a smartphone, I do often have the FOMO when for example I’m on my laptop surfing the web. And sometimes I actually feel like I’m missing out, BECAUSE I don’t have a smartphone. Anyway, some food for thought.
Your statement in itself goes to validify the very point of this. You feel you are missing out because you don’t not have a smartphone and your in person connections are not as”connected” due to others around you being on their smart phones. Their attention is on that device so it makes u think, “what is so great to holds their attention? And what am I missing?”
FOMO is only part of it, I think. Most of it is a lack of good boundaries and/or poor self-confidence. If someone is otherwise engaged in something interesting & worthwhile, and has the strengh to stay focused on that activity or person, other things/people can and ought to wait for a more appropriate time to get attention. If one plans his/her time and priorities well and has the willpower to stick to it, checking person email can wait until one’s lunch break, for example. A lot of it depends where one is in life. Is one in the working world? Use of smartphones for personal matters has to wait, or you’ll perform poorly / maybe lose your job. If communicating with loved ones and/or friends is how one chooses to enjoy his “free” time, so be it! I know some people who are on Facebook daily, while I’ve noticed most of us are on occassionally. There are different levels of “coolness,” depending on your age, circumstances. It might be cool for a teen to be on Facebook 10 times daily vs. a 48 year old adult with a good job? Maybe weekly or less. For the adult with the cool job, too much Facebook time might mean they’re lonely and not otherwise engaged in interesting activities or with interesting people. Or maybe someone is doing those things but feels the need to share that with his/her FB friends. Too much? Insecurity. Anyway, so many factors are involved. Technology and its use is a highly personal matter. Enjoy! I say, use it to your advantage and enjoyment! Try to help others! But that’s just my opinion. What’s yours?
I like the article. It is an interesting perspective. What would be either an example or can you explain to me what the difference is between what your talking about and a person who might not have a social life and wants one? How can we balance making time with people face to face and checking up on our emails, messages, or text without constantly checking?
What is the cure for FOMO? Ironically, its to “plug back into Lifesmâ€and by that I mean real-timesm living in the moment. Be present with what you are doing now. Avoid digital distraction. Use your Internet and digital devices if and when you need to and not to allay an anxiety that you will somehow miss out. The irony is that if you fear you’ll miss out on something or someone, you will miss everything you are trying to experience now: in essence we create Missing Out (MO) by being so focused on FOMO. The truth is that we are only imagining missing out if we leave our smartphone home or even turn it off. Most things will keep until we have the time and attention to check them, otherwise FOMO will rule our lives and we will become slaves to our digital devices instead of being served by them.
Great article, thanks!
I also want to point out that FOMO does not apply only to social interaction. People have a substantial fear of missing out on life in general. This may include being constantly on the lookout for a better job, a better marriage, more money, bigger, faster, newer. So we jump from one carreer to another, from one relationship to the next, etc. Much to our surprise, while we are rushing through life, we are missing out. We’re missing out on being happy in the now.
Cheers!
while i read this article a box in the right corner of my browser told me to like it on facebook and/or retweet
oh the irony
That just happened to me, too. I had to laugh out loud. I’m glad it happened, I was afraid of missing out on the chance.
Seems like everything is created to keep us always informed – but do we really need all that information? The life passes at computer much faster than in real life, I don’t know if it happens to you but for me 4-5 hours at computer pass by like 1 hour in real life. More speed, more messages, more news, more videos, more emoticons – just to keep me attracted to internet. While life is really continuing, our parents are getting older, our kids grow faster and staying on internet many times make us miss important things. Just to stay on internet, I even downloaded birds songs on my mac and listening to them to feel like outside. I hope everyone will wake up one day and realize all this, there has to be measure to everything.
Your i-pod, i-pad, is your new idol. Your i-pod, i-phone has power over you and you can’t get away from your addiction. You hide your true feelings, your true self behind a screen, and most of us don ‘t know who we are anymore, or never knew who we ever were. Most people are going in the wrong direction in life and think they think know better than God what’s best for them. We have no idea what’s best for us, because we don’t know really who we are, and refuse to let God in as our true guide to properly guide our lives.
The only way to really understand and to get to know another is to have FACE to FACE contact with another, without your constant, narcissistic play toy always in the way and a distraction for real genuine interaction. To be FEEL someone elses emotions, to be able to see someone’s REAL facial expression and to feel their energies coming out from them requires being PRESENT for that person only and nothing else at that moment. Have we lost the ability to concentrate only on the thing or moment in front of us? Yes! We move too fast and talk too fast because we have no patience with anything and running too fast towards the thing we fear the most – death! we’ve lost the ability to enjoy the moment for what it is, relax and just enjoy life without having to be electronically stimulated in order to do that. We have very young kids who constantly wield and obsess with these toxic FBI trackers who want to act like they’re adults, and we have sane adults who use these gadgets the same way as these entitled millinium kids who are acting like children, irresponsible, entranced, obsessive, and infantile with them.
God will not tolerate a heretical, immoral, and irresponsible world for too much longer. I suggest you check out the realbiblecode.com site. There will be a major motion picture about the Bible codes coming out on Jan. 5th, 2015. Moses and Elijah the prophet, through the ressurection of the dead, will be here right after the Solar eclipse, exactly on Passover of 2015, to guide Jews and righteous gentiles back to the right path set out by God in the Bible, and our righteous Mashiach/Messiah will show up right around the second Solar eclipse/ at Rosh Hashanah time of 2015, and the War of Gog and Magog against Israel will happen on the Feast of tabernacles or Sukkot of 2015. At that time, all the nations who rebelled, or knew better than God, by letting Satan inconspicuously take over your lives, along with anyone who hated Israel or Jews (First and foremost they are humans before being Jews – and in Gods eyes these people who are hateful, usually hate themselves first, and if they are going to hate Jews, bet you they are going to hate a lot of other things along with it also), will be destroyed through either war or financial collapse – when the dollar soon collapses- or both.
Do you think the world will still be the same, with people using their i-phones as another extension of their ego, and prancing around being haughty, thinking they are God, and they are a entitled gift to the world – maybe Satan’s gift to the world! The world will not be the same, your forlorn illusions will be taken away from you, you will have to change by having your third eye open up to the true realities of the universe, or you’ll be history like the age of pisces will come to pass.
One of the jobs of the Messiah is to destroy the evil forces and the i-dols, i-pods of this world. There won’t be a need for it, when most technology will be destroyed anyway through the war of Gog and Magog and we proudly or are forced to go back to living like caveman, finally living again in the Garden of Eden. God’s plan of the world will succeed, and only the humble shall inherit the earth.
Absolutely love this!
I can relate to this article on a very high level, in fact I’m beginning to feel anxiety as a result of the “FOMO”.
I think I’ve become too cynical for FOMO. I have the case of the f-its. I just don’t care any more and just want to stay in my own bubble.
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