Hey you! Exactly you, the lovely person reading this article. Have you every experienced FOMO – the famous “fear of missing out”? I bet you do as statistically most people who have the access, time and willingness to read this article had.
I assume that you perceive it as a negative and stressful emotion. A feeling of restlessness; a feeling of pressure to make a choice without wanting to make it as there is not a one single choice that would allow you to escape the feeling of loss aversion.
And albeit the discomfort that this feeling gives us, if we change a bit our perspective, we might realize that the more FOMO we can experience, the better our lives are. That might sound absurd but it actually isn’t if we take a more pragmatic view on it.
But first things first: Where does FOMO seem from? FOMO reflects our perception that we have the opportunity to choose from multiple options that are available to us in connection to the fact that we can’t have all of them: If we decide for one option we have to leave the other option aside. Examples are endless: If two concerts are happening at the same time, we can’t attend both. In a monogamic society we cannot have a serious relationship with more than one partner at the same time. If we order one dish at a restaurant, we can order one or two more, but we can’t eat all the other 20 options on the menu the same night.
The issue of seemingly endless choice has been subject to many studies. Most of them point out the same key finding: The multitude of decisions that we have to make daily overwhelms us. And being overwhelmed leads to frustration, frustration leads to unhappiness, unhappiness leads to anger .. ok, I will stop to pretend being Yoda and jump back to the point: Having options to choose from is a two-sided sword. It is a blessing and a curse at the same time. [1]
Is it however? Let us try examining our perception because in the end our perception of things it is (sorry, can’t stop with Yoda style slang ..) what shapes our personal reality and emotional states.
For those of us who were lucky to be born in the right place and at the right time, into the abundance of post-industrial society of the late 20th and early 21st century, having limitless options is a given. It has been there since we have been born and we haven’t experienced anything different. We disregard the historical context (e.g. how exhausting and limiting life was in the Middle Ages) and into regional context (e.g. how hard life still is in many parts of the world). As a consequence, we take the blessing as a status quo. We take the blessings that we have (an indeed they are!) as the average bottom line and observe mostly the downside of it: Being overwhelmed when it’s time to choose.
Let me tell you how the opposite of it may look like: As a kid of the former Soviet Union, I can just remember too well, the first time that I was able to travel outside of the Ukraine to Israel and later to Germany. In the early 90ies in Kiev, there were not too many things that you can buy in the supermarket. It was certainly more than during the Stalin, Khrushchev or Brezhnev eras but nothing compared to the standard of Western malls at that time. Having the Soviet scarcity as a bottom line, experiencing the abundance of choice is a true experience of joy, bliss and bless.
Of course, the solution should not be to return to Soviet economic standards here and there. It is a rather an issue of being conscious, being conscious that what we perceive as problems when we experience FOMO are not even 1st world problems; I like to coin them “0th world problems”: If we take the example from above: “you can’t attend two concerts as they happen at the same time.” – a very typical situation if you go to a music festival as there are multiple stages where great artists perform at the same time. Leaving the “loss aversion” perspective for a moment aside, you can see that you have the resources (health, time and money) to attend the festival. Moreover, there is a festival taking place that you can attend that is not too far away and the artists that you adore have been invited.
Nevertheless, we can go a step further and remember ourselves that “not done now” doesn’t mean “never”. It applies to so many examples: If we recall the restaurant example: We could come again in a day, a week or a month, to try out the other delicious things on the list. If we are in a busy area in Berlin, Rome or Amsterdam, where one café looks more inviting than the other, we can enter one and later enter another. We can consciously liberate ourselves from the idea of “I have to have it all NOW.”. Now is a pretty strong constraint that doesn’t have to be. Luckily, many of us can already live almost a century and there are thousands of remarkably talented people all around the planet to extend our livespans and healthspans much further.
So, we can loosen the constraint in the time dimension and then we are not missing out on a thing, we are just doing one thing at a time and later another one. And all of these things are great because we wanted to do them in the first place anyways. What a shame it would be if you experienced everything worth experiencing in the blink of a moment and the rest of existence would be a dull and boring. I know it’s often said “to live in the moment” and that is true but everything in this world needs balance and I think that the right balance is also to “live one particular thing in the moment and leave other things consciously for another moments to come.”
“Very well” you might say but what about things where opportunity cost is involved? If you take job A, you might have a higher salary, but if you take job B, you might get a better network of people to learn from and grow, and if you take job C, you get virtual shares that might be worth millions in a couple of years from now? First of all, congratulations – it’s an amazing privilege to have such great options to choose from. Secondly, I have very consciously chosen the word “might” in the enumeration above to reflect the fact that many of the opportunity cost that make us feel uneasy about our choices are imaginary. They are often assumptions about the things that we have to choose from. This is nothing wrong or negative, we have to make assumptions in order to able to make choices at all. Assumptions represent some reasonable piece of information to us - our best guess. Otherwise, we would be making choices completely blindfolded.
The important thing about assumptions is that it’s important to validate them. When you start doing so, you can very well discover that things that seemed to be an option, are not an actual option when you look into the fine print. Maybe job A doesn’t pay as well as you thought and during the first two months at job B you find out that the people are not as interesting and inspiring as you thought they would be. As Paul Graham said in one of his essay: Project procrastination is worse than task procrastination. If you never try something, you live in a permanent feeling of “could have done” which is nothing else then calculating imaginary opportunity costs based on wishful thinking. Once you start exploring and executing, you will find out one of two things: Either there are good reasons why it’s harder, or much harder, to do what you thought and you will have piece of mind as the efforts outweigh the energy that you would like to put in; or you will discover something that is worth your time and efforts and then the other opportunities become (at least temporary) irrelevant to you.
I would like to spend one more paragraph on opportunity cost: It may appear like an “induction ad absurdum” but if you can also picture it this way: At any point in time, the total value of what you are not doing are is by far exceeding, the things that you are doing. When you rest, you could be working, and when you work, you could be enjoying an ice cream with your kids or spending time in nature with your friends. And when you are in nature, you could be in a forest but also in the mountains or swimming in the ocean. In fact, at any given time, when you choose one thing, you also make (an unconscious) choice to not do all the other possible things in the world. I decide not to code, not to workout, not to dance, not to read, not to spend time with my loved ones, but to be in front of a notebook and writing this article. And you do as well while reading these lines. Why? Because we instinctively think that it is the best thing we can for now, given our remembered past and our imagined future. Is it so? We cannot know but this is also true for any other choice we do. Thus, anything we chose in a conscious or subconscious way represents a bet where the increasing non-linearity of life [2], makes it harder to make clear prediction on which way will lead us to which outcome. This topic is so interesting and wide that I will dive into it in more breadth in a follow-up post.
For now, I would like to come back to a different thing that seems to be FOMO but I would argue, it is actually not. If you catch yourself with thoughts like “I should have invested in Bitcoin back in 2013 and in Tesla back in 2018”, I think it is not FOMO, it is more a type of regret. And indeed, that type of thinking can be a frustrating and discouraging thought loop. I think that the connection with FOMO comes from a different angle: It comes from the way that we can shape our perception of the same facts.
One way thing is to reminder yourself that what you are perceiving are 0th world problems: You had and probably still have the financial means to jump onto some of the riskiest investment opportunities on the market. Another thing to remind yourself is that not at least due to the acceleration in our world, new opportunities are around the conner: After bitcoin, there was the opportunity to jump very early onto Ethereum. If you missed Tesla, recently you could have invested into NVIDIA. And the next thing is surely around the corner. And if you don’t like stocks or crypto, there are also plenty of other options.
And if you think “now it’s too late, it would have been better 5 years ago.”. That is true. But so it will be in 5 years from now; and in 10 years. I met people who started only in their mid 50ies and it’s not too late for them. And it’s not too late for you. If you are not convinced still, you might like to watch this: [3]
I hope that you found your way back from youtube to read some closing thoughts on the topic: You might have heard the famous quote from Viktor Frankl, who formed much of this wisdom surviving the unimaginable horrors of the holocaust: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” It is exactly this space that we have to form a new response to the stimulus that we associate with FOMO. Our new response can be gratitude. The fact that we can have FOMO, means that we live on this planet at the right time. We live in a society that offers us abundant choice and abundant opportunity. Our parents, grandparents and generations fought hard for us to be where we are now.
When you are confronted with FOMO again [4], remember to thank God [5] for it; and your day gets a little bit better.
[1] Maybe you see sometimes people who are gifted in many different ways. That might seem like an unfair distribution of gifts. However, as said above. It is a blessing and curse at the same time. You have to deliberately decide which talents to leave aside (at least for a bit). It might sound absurd but a very narrow but overproportionate spectrum of talents might be of advantage as (a) you don’t have to decide and (b) you profit from superlinear returns as you put all your time into one thing and you have a outstanding ability to it.
[2] If take broader perspective on history, we see that the “linear prosperity period” that our grandparents and parents lived through after the second world ended in Central Europe and Japan marks a historic outlier. In fact most of history was written in blood and a permanent state of uncertainty due to conflicts between monarchs, churches and empires.
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=SemHh0n19LA
[4] I found myself confronted with FOMO especially often either scrolling through my LinkedIn feed (and seeing the great achievements of everybody else) or through the regular LinkedIn E-Mails telling me about all the great job opportunities that are out there. If you can’t turn off LinkedIn (or Instagram or TikTok) as you need it for your professional career development, I would really recommend doing two seemingly obvious things: (1) Turn off the automated open positions suggested by LinkedIn. (2) When you enter LinkedIn don’t use the “default landing page” but go to a page which convey no news, e.g. your profile page. Doing so you are not constantly exposed to the stuff that captures your attention while it is needed somewhere else.
[5] or Shiva, or Allah, or the Universe, or the creators of the Simulation or whatever you believe in .. trust me you believe in something even if it is not of a spiritual (and/or) mystical nature.