Is Your FOMO Misdirected?
The other week I went to northern California for a writer’s conference near San Francisco, and I took a couple of extra days to explore before the conference. I’d actually never seen the redwoods in person before, so I decided to hike a bit in the Muir Woods monument. (I’ve been living in flat land for so long I lost my hillpower – but that’s another story!)
It was really hot for northern California – so hot that the electric company shut off the power completely in the evening to avoid wildfires. But when you’re hiking in a forest, it’s a lot cooler. The redwoods are majestic, and of course I had to touch them and pet the moss on some of them and do all of that.
In Muir Woods Monument, there’s space to relax underneath the tree canopy. One is called Cathedral Grove, and you’re supposed to be silent as you walk through it. Which is an AWESOME experience, especially since there were plenty of people down there.
And I saw a woman walking slowly and calmly along the path with her phone in her hand, all of her attention on the phone.
All of the beauty and majesty of the redwoods. There was a little trickling creek running through it, and birds and small animals. A lot of gorgeous things to take in.
Can you imagine? Walking along a majestic path in (relatively) unspoiled nature and ignoring it completely to..what, watch an AI ad? Read an email? See that your friend liked your post on FaceStaLinkPinTok or whatever?
And no, it was clearly not an emergency, which I think is the only excuse for being absorbed in your phone amid natural wonders. I’ve never seen anyone, when faced with a true emergency, continue to amble along like this woman did.
The memes will be on the Internet forever (as long as they follow the rules of Obersturmfuhrer Stephen Miller and other nutsy Nazis, if they get their way). Your email is there any time you want and can be saved for decades. Do you really need to click that AI slop ad? (No you don’t.)
Save your brain and protect your mental health simply by putting your phone away sometimes
Here’s the thing. The smartphone and its app, like computers and software and all the other tech things, can absolutely help you do things. When used as tools, which is what they are, your tech use is fine.
One of the biggest problems is using tech as a source of entertainment. Or believing that it is the best or easiest way to connect with friends and family. Unfortunately, it also exposes everyone to what the Joneses are up to, hence the FOMO.
But maybe you’re a person who wants to keep up with what’s happening in the world, so you’ve got a news app with notifications on and you scroll through it as well. The app doesn’t give you analysis or context, just data. Information, not knowledge.
This leads to a sense of dread, because you’re taking in all this news, and there’s nothing you can do about any of it. It used to be said of nightly news that if it bleeds, it leads, and that’s not less true now that we have access to news worldwide.
The news often makes you feel worse, but it doesn’t have any effect on your actual life. There’s no action to take, except maybe to call your Congresscritter. There’s nothing in your daily life that changes as a result of what you see. Except to put you in a negative mood. Because… you don’t already have enough of that in your life?
Humans are social animals. True, some of us need a lot less “peopling”, but all of us need to feel that we love and are loved by other humans. This is how we survived as a species back when we had actual predators and hadn’t taken over the world yet.
Not through some bull$hit bootstrapping or lone heroes tackling lions out on the savannah. (Neither of those is an actual thing that happened.) We survived in small tribes and banded together to hunt and gather food. Being with other people is how we turned away predators and eventually peopled the rest of the world.
Remember, the human brain developed hundreds of thousands of years ago, without computers, grocery stores, cars, or even chairs. Even though humans invented computers, our brains don’t recognize typing or clicking a button under someone else’s post as social interaction.
When you scroll through your “social” media, you’re looking at information (much of it designed to elicit fear and/or greed, due to the algorithms of the platforms) that you can’t really make use of.
You see a lot of information that you can’t do anything about, and you just want your brain to hold it. But you’ve also asked your brain to hold how many people are coming to dinner and which of the kids has baseball tonight and what time you’re supposed to pick them up and hey, the comment seemed a little terse is she mad at me and my aunt’s birthday is coming up what am I going to get her and that pink dress looks kinda cute maybe I should buy it and I’m not sure how much money I have for groceries for the week and ohmigod [politician] did [stupid thing], why do they keep voting for him but my politician is fine and why did I walk into this room I wanted something but I can’t remember and ohmigod does that mean I have Alzheimer’s better check and ohmigod a symptom of Alzheimer’s is forgetting things but that’s also a symptom of being 53 and wait am I 54 or 53, I can’t remember, so I definitely am in the late stages of dementia and…
Which is part of why you’re so exhausted at the end of the day – if you’re always on your phone or screen and always scrolling you’re seeing a lot of things that are overloading your brain.
Then what happens? At home everybody has a screen! Right up until bedtime, and boy it seems strange that with all that “relaxing” in front of the blue light emitting screen (that we know affects your ability to fall asleep) you still have trouble sleeping.
FOMO is real, but be afraid of real things
What exactly are you going to miss out on if you do something that’s not on your phone? Seriously. Think about it right now, what you’ve seen on your screens the past few days. What would happen if you didn’t see it at the very second the news/email/whatever was released?
(If you are caring for someone, like a parent or a child, you may need to be notified when they contact you. But that doesn't mean you should enable all notifications.)
Do you really need to know what the news is every second of the day? Or have notifications on to get “breaking news” of a rat eating pizza or a politician running or not running?
You want to stay informed, but you don’t need an app or notifications. You could simply pick a time at the end of the day to look at news, or maybe in the morning instead, the way we did with TV.
I follow and subscribe to a number of independent journalists, most of whom are on Substack so I get their emails in my inbox. I read them at times of my choosing. The added bonus is that the ones I follow have expertise in a particular subject, so they can provide context and analysis without false equivalences.
Same with emails. This isn't rocket surgery :-). No one is going to die because I didn’t get to their email or text in time (and unless you're in some kind of emergency business, the same goes for you.) Just like my news, I read through them at a time of my choosing.
Because we have limited time, each minute you spend with AI slop, ads on “social”, email, and other things is a minute you didn’t:
Connect with someone you love (commenting on a post isn’t “connection” to your brain)
See something beautiful – a redwood grove, a desert, an ocean, a sunrise, a sunset, a cute little bus stop in your town
Do something you genuinely enjoy – a hobby, a craft, a sport, a relaxing read in the hammock
Make someone else’s day a little brighter
Cuddle your kids and/or pets
Love someone and be loved by someone
When your face is in your screen, you ARE missing out – on life. And that’s what you should be afraid of, not that you’re going to miss the next trend on FaceStaLinkPinTok.
That email will be there in a few hours or tomorrow. But your loved one may not.
Recap (tl;dr):
While a lot of people have FOMO, it’s not about real life. But that’s what’s really important, so put down the screens sometimes.
Don’t have enough time to do real $hit? I’ll help you put down the screens and enjoy life. Click here for your personal complimentary consultation.