FOMO- Let’s make use of the FEAR
It was on a traditional festival day, one of the peak times where I usually deeply feel homesick for being away from home, it was further rubbed in by the continuous wishes of family, friends, and relatives to make the feel of ‘missing celebrations’ worst. We school friends (Longtime and Faraway friends) got on a group call to wish each other and we also started talking a bit about how we would celebrate the festival being living in a ‘foreign land’. Moreover, staying away from home country and yet planning to celebrate, is nostalgic and absolute fun. But beyond all this, the truth is, there was a sense of FOMO in us which pulled us to do all the preparations by ourselves for the festival to sail through the celebrations of the day.
So what is FOMO by the way?
The fear of missing out!!!- By now we’d all have been encountered the fear of missing fun, experience, or an opportunity at one stage in life or the other. Can we introspect ourselves on it, until we could blindly agree with that statement?… Have we ever felt anxious when we read or hear about the events which we are not involved in it, for instance, ‘all my school friends are catching up but I can’t join them because I have music classes to attend, oh! they will have so much fun without me’, or while scrolling down social media snippets of other people’s lives, did it triggered comparison, envy, insecurity, and intensified our feelings-‘oh! others are having a lot more fun or a better life than mine’ and yeah, these kinds of examples will keep going in the present digital era.
Yes!! we all have experienced and been in such situations but it is not that ‘scariest fear’, oh yeah, as far as it is not affecting one’s mental health and self-esteem. On the flip side, FOMO can also work as an incredible motivational tool. Here’s why having a little bit of FOMO is a good thing.
When we fear too much of something, it is often true that we make dumb decisions, but having a bit of fear works in the other way. I strongly think we should fear missing out a little bit in life. Well enough to make feel self-conscious and to break the warmth of our cozy life, but not well enough to choke in envy though. If it freaks you out and paralyzes you in indecision, let it go, get clear on what you want, and move forward with a focus on what brings you joy rather than what you’re afraid of not having. Sometimes by looking at others’ success, we can empower us to strive for more. We can use that as motivation as fuel. When someone shares a photo of a beautiful location, it can evoke a lot of weird feelings. I‘m sure all adventurers can relate to the immediate sense of wanderlust, there’s a sense of excitement to go there and get a big shot, and there’s often a feeling of jealousy too to be pointedly honest. Spending time outside recharges one’s soul. Yes, experiences are those that matter at the end of the day. One more mind trick I would suggest is, you can call me as lazy but I like the idea of embracing the art of doing nothing for a period of time and that helps me in prioritizing self-love and which obviously gives such an immense privilege to be in a moment.
Yeah, so far so good, to conclude- I think the main thing to remember about social media is why are we using it and how are we using it!! and one question that constantly haunts me ever since is, do we really need a media to showcase our life’s materialistic desires while others are struggling to meet their ends? Well, it's a debatable one:)