With all due honesty, FOMO, or the fear of missing out, is not just a social media acronym—it is a real-life stress-inducer.
We should probably face it: FOMO messes with our heads. It makes us feel like we are not living our best lives unless we are constantly out of the house, attending every social gathering, trying every new restaurant, and flaunting our acquaintances on our Instagram stories. The fact that this is neither healthy nor even vaguely realistic does nothing to the nagging feeling of exclusion.
FOMO thrives on comparison. It tricks us into believing that everyone else has it better than we do—that their lives are more exciting, more fulfilling, more Instagram-worthy. Sure, it is natural to feel a twinge of jealousy or curiosity when we see others having fun without us. But when that feeling starts to consume us, forcing us into spending unnecessary bucks and calories with people we would rather not spend it with, is it really worth everything?
Suffice it to say, my first-ever experience with this kind of anxiety came earlier than others, in the form of having no cell phone – smartphone or otherwise – until well into high school. Growing up in a bubble away from social media, my early teen years were marked by a different kind of FOMO—the fear of missing out on the entirety of social media itself. While my friends were busy scrolling through their Facebook feed, posting on Snapchat, sending each other Instagram DMs, I sometimes felt like I was on the outside looking in, entirely disconnected.
Maybe Korean middle school proved to be busy and demanding enough that somehow, FOMO did not manage to get ahold of me entirely, meaning my mostly nondigital hobbies got me through without any major scratches to my self-worth. However, much changed when I moved to Europe and began my life as a freshman at an international high school.
After a few weeks of declining my new classmates’ verbal follow requests and facing the same expression of sheer perplexity at my response that I, in fact, did not have a single social account, followed more than a year as going by “the kid without a smartphone,” I began to wonder if it was finally time to let go of my weird pride in my no-social-media status and cave into the demands of my surroundings. Following no small amount of whining and convincing my dubious parents, I was finally able to obtain my first-ever iPhone, and accordingly, an Instagram account.
It took me only a few weeks to realize that FOMO does not go away with having a well-connected social media account. It honestly just gets worse.
At its core, maybe this is just a manifestation of our deepest insecurities—the persistent fear that we are not living our lives to the “fullest.” It drives us to seek validation and approval from others, often at the expense of our own authenticity and even mental health.
Maybe a social media detox is not the most realistic or even the best way to rid yourself of FOMO. Typical advice like “cultivate more self-love” or “stop caring so much about what others think” sounds cliché and unrealistic. But what really helped me was the realization that everyone who seems so social and well-connected, the very people we constantly measure ourselves against, likely battle with the same anxiety as they struggle to keep up with their social media game.
While this obviously will not make FOMO magically disappear and free us from the self-woven trap of toxic competition with virtual strangers, it still can be food for thought and a good starting point to realize that we are not doing so bad after all, and we do not need the extra attention or validation of others to know so.