Diary Aug 20: FOMO

I forgot where I took this photo. It is a shot taken from inside a Starbucks in Hong Kong. I remember meeting a net friend that day. He was quite a well-built Finnish man. He has given my his name card and I indeed kept it for quite some years but it was lost in the time of decluttering later in life.

Since that time up till now, if there’s one habit of mine that has not been lost, it should be my capability of making new friends online. Sometimes I meet them in person if we find each other living on the same page — with similar interest or at least keeping a part of gem that the other person is interested in knowing more. For example, few years ago, I met a businessman who is now enjoying life with her girlfriend in Portugal. I haven’t really asked him where he came from, or, have I? I forgot. Well, it may sound a bit out of the reality if it is without asking his nationality when we were still on the stage of knowing the very basic layer of each other but the nationality doesn’t matter. What matters the most is my awareness of and my actual ability of making friends online, which is far easier than making friends offline.

In other words, the real world.

From the age of Xanga which hopefully you know what it is, its transition to MSN, then the later social network giant Facebook, further away the left hand side of the time line comes the introduction of the simplistic Instagram and until the current social network I am joyfully indulging in — liker.social on Mastodon (Yes, sorry, I nearly missed my rarely used Twitter which doesn’t even occupy a seat on my phone), I am more than aware of one crystal clear fact which is that I have never been truly affected severely by FOMO.

Knowing this term for quite some time but not having seriously researched it, I search its meaning and to my surprise, it is not confined to an internet jargon anymore but it rises to its fame in Oxford dictionary — finally, after all these years of construction of social networking maze.

Wait, isn’t it just a fear of missing out information on social media or the latest updates of my ‘friends’ on my friend list? Why is it suddenly transformed into the fear, or, to be exact, the jealousy of other’s probably more affluent life and the induced confusion of the life you are living? There may be a more interesting event or exciting event happening elsewhere? I have never thought about that. I have never caught up with the latest posts of my online friends or offline real world friends every single minute. I mean, it’s just insane!

Life is short. We have to focus a lot on our family, career, meditation, cultivation of our hobbies and other ways of personal enlightenment. Com’on! We can’t really afford FOMO even if you would beg to be one of those who are wearing the bandage of what seems to me is a mental disorder.

The reason behind this incapability is more than obvious: What everyone possesses is merely 24 hours. On top of what we need to catch up with all the time is our time to hit the gym or the jogging trail in the nearby park, our family, career and other tangles of commitment that we have promised other human beings, or animals, or plants in this world. How can we constantly catch up with the endless stream of information with our limited time?

There has always been someone, probably a best-seller author, or some bloggers specialising in mental health, who asks: How would you possibly and fully use your 24 hours?

I am not sure about my answers. I can never submit a detailed break-down of my itinerary every single day. Yet, what I can say for sure is that the proportion of time for me to chase after the tails of the newly popped-up posts on social media or the old posts that are sinking down is not, was not and will not be the majority of my pie chart of “Allocation Of My 24 hours On A Daily Basis”!

As endless as it may have already occurred to writers on Medium, Vocus, Matters and other writing platforms, if we want to expand the time we use to run after the new and old articles on these websites, it will inevitably mean an encroachment of the time we can otherwise use in other different ways such as reading a paperback, lighting up a candle, sitting beside a pillow to wind down, or just simply eating some snacks and letting our thoughts go for awhile (or in the wild). And the brutal fact is that, some of us may have already invested the largest proportion of time on these writing platforms to write our own stories (just like what I’m doing now) or checking on other valuable pieces.

Therefore, there’s definitely no way for us to spend even MORE time — the amount which is larger than 100% or longer in any way than the current amount of time we have chosen to spend — on keeping track of these new and old posts in the ocean of passages. This hasn’t come to my realisation until one day, when I was totally lost in the maze of passages I was reading, as well as those that had long been kept in my Bookmark.

The articles in my bookmark page could just later find out that I could not really finish reading them in 1–2 days. The list keeps growing like an organic plant. Therefore, the thought struck me, the thought that I will NEVER EVER be able to finish reading all articles which will just keep popping up. Even I just narrow down to only those I am interested in, it is all the same because there is one status in the world which is called ‘I don’t want to do anything or read anything at all.’ It is an idleness of emotion and physical capability. To put it simply, I just want to lie down and look at the ceiling for some moments without talking or reading — not even thinking to be honest!

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