Lessons from Stoics to overcome FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)
Fear Of Missing Out is unavoidable in our modern consumer society
It has never been easier, in the history of humanity, to get something as fast as it is today. Everything is just a click away and the only limit seems to be the size of your wallet. Advertising encourages you to consume because the temptations are innumerable. It makes you want everything right now. The ultimate ideal of society even seems to have become to get everything you want, right now.
Yet, this demand for total freedom inevitably creates frustration, born of the fear of missing something. This fear has a name: “Fear of Missing Out”. Indeed, the opportunities have become too numerous, as the injunctions to “enjoy life to the fullest” is everywhere. For example, if what you have chosen is not as good as you would have hoped, you are the only one responsible. You will have the impression that you should have looked better and longer because a better alternative necessarily existed. This attitude creates an unconscious pressure: You must always be on the lookout for the latest novelty, the trend of the moment or the best price.
It also encourages you to constantly check what others are doing. You will analyze for example your relatives, your friends, but also strangers, who expose their lives, their holidays or their latest acquisitions on social networks. As a result, you probably feel that your present life is “not as beautiful” as that of others. Thus, the FOMO is an incessant sting, that makes you constantly search for what you do not have, without knowing what you are looking for.
FOMO comes unconsciously from human psychology
While new technologies and advertising marketing tips have made FOMO worse, they are not the only ones responsible. Indeed, while it is true that they accelerated the movement, they did not create it from scratch. The fear of missing out is intrinsically linked to human nature. This is mainly due to mortality and hedonic treadmill.
Man is the only living being aware of his mortality. This awareness of his fragility inevitably pushes him to seek to live quickly and as intensively as possible. This inevitably leads to current issues concerning the excess of consumer society.
The hedonic treadmill is the human tendency to return to the same level of happiness after something very good or very bad has happened. The human being gets used to everything very quickly: it is about the “hedonic treadmill”. Research in psychology has shown that, regardless of the event, happy or unhappy, people quickly recover their usual emotional state after a period of euphoria or abatement. External events do not influence your happiness as much as you might think. Jean-Jacques Rousseau describes it well:
“Since these conveniences by becoming habitual had almost entirely ceased to be enjoyable, and at the same time degenerated into true needs, it became much crueler to be deprived of them than to possess them was sweet, and men were unhappy to lose them without being happy to possess them », Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Learning to control the FOMO is essential to happiness. The constant search for novelty has serious negative consequences. This is observed both in society and your happiness.
Solutions from stoic’s philosophy of the Antiquity to prevent FOMO
Since Antiquity, individuals have tried to find a solution to the problems raised by this incessant thirst for novelty. The legacy of the Stoics seems to be one of the most useful for overcoming modern excesses. The latter promoted two main techniques to deal with those desires: negative visualization and defensive pessimism.
Negative visualization to value more what you have
The Stoics start from a simple idea: you are more likely to be happy by being satisfied with what you already have, rather than looking for what you do not have yet. How to be satisfied with what you have, when so many things exist elsewhere? To achieve this, use negative visualization. In other words: imagine that you lose what you have. For example, imagine that your health is deteriorating or that the person you love suddenly comes to disappear.
Even though it seems to be brutal to have those thoughts, no doubt you automatically will appreciate more than you already have. In this way, you reactivate your satisfaction and you have much less need to look for something else. This process is radically opposed to the one that is the trend today, the “positive visualization”. For example, many personal development works advise you to think highly and in detail about what you do not have yet so that you can make it a goal and achieve it. However, if you fail, you are heading for even more frustrations. On the other hand, negative visualization is immediately usable. Besides, it brings concrete benefits as soon as it is implemented. Therefore, the Stoics preached a simple and uncluttered life. So, you do not have to own a lot when you know how to value things and people.
Defensive pessimism to enjoy the present moment
This other technique is based on the voluntary lowering of expectations that you can have of life by reminding you that your end is inevitable. Starting from this principle, you remember as often as possible that you are mortal instead of running everywhere to forget it, as prompted by the FOMO. Once this state of pessimism is reached, you can reduce your expectations. Indeed, what is important is more easily revealed to you and you lose less time chasing chimeras. Moreover, you learn to live with what you cannot change and to focus on what you really want.
Defensive pessimism makes you neither apathetic nor depressed, but rather alert and focused on the present. Combined with negative visualization, this technique will make you enjoy all the pleasures and small joys of everyday life with great intensity. By applying those techniques, you’ll automatically be less subject to your FOMO and replace it to the JOMO (the joy of miss — “Joy of Missing Out”). It will give a solid structure to your life and allow you to focus on the essentials. The happiness of doing nothing is discovered over time. Be patient.
Conclusion
Whatever you do, whatever you decide, there will always be better elsewhere, and you cannot live all the lives you aspire to. You can only live one: it is, therefore, important that it be as faithful as possible to your values rather than often illusory hopes. Do not get dragged into paths that will eventually lead you to nothing satisfactory. On the contrary, learn the “joy of missing”, because each time you feel it, you will get closer to yourself. Keep in mind that our wants are many and insatiable, but more importantly, our needs are few and fundamental.