FOMO: Why are we so scared of being left out?

You know when you scroll down the home of Instagram and think about doing it with your brain off but without realizing it, you notice the details, pay attention to what that contact you have never seen in your life is doing, who frequents that environment there, visit that super interesting place, with that outfit that would you too but can’t replicate with your wardrobe, hang out with people who seem so glamorous, and maybe even do your dream job that you haven’t gotten to yet because you’re still trying to graduate? The emotion that accompanies such moments is an insistent anxiety, the feeling that the ground is missing under your feet, the anguish of not doing enough or of being left behind in the rankings while everyone else is living their best life.

There is a word to define this sensation, or more precisely an acronyms: FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out, literally the fear of being missing something, of being cut off.

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Cut yourself off, but what? From the “best” that the world can offer us: not so much the party in Ibiza or the boat holiday, but more precisely a possible reality that we too dream or feel we deserve, and for many different reasons, we are not living.

It’s a bit funny, in times like these, that someone else is having a great time and doing just what they want: almost everything is closed, the country is in crisis, the fewer people we see the better, parties are strongly discouraged. Yet this is there cross and delight of social media: we can always find someone * who is doing something better than us, or who seems to us so. Maybe we don’t know anything about that person, we don’t really know his working reality, the relational dynamics with his friends, what he talks about with his partner. Above all, we don’t really know what’s going through her head and how she approaches the world. If we really got to know her, maybe we wouldn’t even like it. And in envying his life it would be better to ask himself a crucial question: are we really seeing that person or are we pouring out our shortcomings in his latest post?

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Sometimes the confirmation of our sense of failure also depends on what we post: how many are enjoying the photo? How many comments on the post? Are the views too few? Zero retweets? Nobody gives a damn *? Our life seems to depend on how much resonance we get on these platforms, based on the rapid approval of people, often strangers, who seem to give us validity and credit with the speed of a finger on the screen. We called the 50-year-old a boomer who told us we spend too much time on social media because we hate lectures, but was he right? Are we really a generation ruined by social media? Maybe, some more some less, as other generations have been ruined by smoking, alcohol, drugs and there are no more half seasons, right?

We can force ourselves to spend less time on the phone, we can time ourselves (the iPhone often reminds me of it already: you spent a total of 5 hours in front of the screen. I would like to ask him: what do you want? Are you my mother?). We can work on our addiction, even with commitment and effort. But above all, before locking the phone in a drawer, we might ask ourselves: what do we really need? We could talk about it openly, express our discomfort about what seems to be missing in our life that makes us so dissatisfied. We could do this with people we really know and trust, who may remind us of our strengths, the ones we have forgotten because they are too busy fantasizing about the profile of a person we have never talked to. And before going back to shaking we could remember that we are much more multifaceted, complex and interesting than what we show on social networks and that the only reality from which we have been really cut off is nothing more than an image.

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