The Fear of Missing Out
The mainstream notion of “the fear of missing out” is fundamentally flawed. When we truly take time to think about it—when we consider the staggering scale and complexity associated with absolutely everything that we could ever do in our entire life—we actually accomplish very little in our lives. Irrespective of the degree of ambition or initiative we have to cross off every item on our bucket lists, we nonetheless exhaust an infinitesimally small fraction of this daunting, infinite realm of possibility. The far more profound realization that we can make is that we all “miss out” equally.
“The fear of missing out” makes no real distinction between variety of activity and uniqueness of life experience; it is predicated on a spurious assumption that having more types of activities is inherently good, as it purportedly allows for more variation in our actual unique experience of life itself. But what if the nature of our experience of life is as much about what we don’t experience versus what we do experience? We are primarily defined by the interconnected sum of all the moments in our lives—regardless if they were moments of happiness or sadness, of pride or shame, of momentous importance or stark inconsequentiality, of abundant joy or woeful oppression—not the moments themselves; this ultimately means that the present act of interposing more variety of activity—by way of sparse and loosely related activities, at that—barely affects that collective sum. We are who we are only because of the incredibly specific set of circumstances that belong only to ourselves.
Virtually every individual who did anything remotely important in this world only did what they did because of the very specific way by which they chose to go about their lives. If we truly believe in a “fear of missing out,” all the success stories we learn about are actually failure stories. Martin Luther King, Jr. would be a failure; why didn’t he feel obligated to travel the world, go to more festivities, or get involved in more hobbies, when he instead consigned himself to the strife associated with leading and advocating for the civil rights of his people? Steve Jobs would be a failure; ninety hours of work per week is certainly going to increase his chances of missing out on all the joy and entertainment he could have going out with his friends or family.
If it doesn’t consume much of our time, it will still consume our attention. However minute and however significant, whatever the aggregate amount of mental energy spent must be less than our total mental capacity. Regardless of how resilient we think we are, for everyone there is an absolute limit; not only do we have to avoid reaching that absolute limit to circumvent the possibility of mental breakdown, but we must be perhaps even more mindful of the complex and dynamic interplay between all that preoccupies us. The mentality behind the “fear of missing out” presupposes that there is no limit to our attention and our energy—that simply cramming our lives with ceaselessly more variety is inherently beneficial. But whether they are larger questions in life—whether to engage with social media, to take on a side hustle or a second job, to get into a relationship—or something as insignificant as worrying about what brand of soap we use, what we will eat for dinner today, or what we will wear to a party, almost everything in our lives has an unforeseeable and incalculable cascading effect that impacts the outcome of our lives and the formation of our character far more than we might presume.
Not only is it that the quality of our work—what we originally set out to do in this world—can degrade depending on what clutters our information space and our perception, but it is also that the things that we decide belong within the realm of our consciousness can shape our character, whether for better or for worse. Indeed, there is great truth to be told in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations—“The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts”—as well as in the Bible, in Matthew 6:21—”for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” It is a mistake to construe ourselves as distinct, immutable entities navigating through time and space to find our way, when time, space, our corporeal being, and our consciousness are all one and the same—all essential, inseparable components of our universe that warp one another in inconceivable, endlessly complex ways. And to repeat one in a billion of those interactions amidst this incomprehensible chaos—at the same exact time, in the same exact place, in the same exact arrangement of atoms of all the molecules of our body, and all the exact sequences of chemical reactions occurring at every one of our neurotransmitters that constitute our experience of consciousness—would be an impossible task.
Mindfulness matters because it is the only means by which we can take control of this peculiar existence we’ve all been hurled into. If we choose to operate solely based on our capricious, unpredictable emotions, we have no choice but to accept our fate. ”Providence or atoms,” divine will or this incomprehensible chaotic entropy of the universe regardless, we cannot erase the indelible, reverse the irreversible, and change the unchangeable. If we’re not satisfied with the life we’ve wrought for ourselves, that if we’re not happy with the person that we’ve become, that if we’re not content with the product of the circumstances that we’ve been given, there is no one to blame but ourselves, nothing at fault but our own ignorance.
It isn’t about a variety of activities. It isn’t about “missing out,” because we all “miss out” on the opportunity to live out someone else’s unique experience of life, however banal or sensational they seem on the surface. It’s about embracing the vastly different walks of life we each possess. It’s about recognizing that while we don’t necessarily have to be proud of everything we experience and don’t experience alike, it will nevertheless ultimately define who we are and what we achieve.
