F.O.M.O
It’s your life you are missing!
The fear of missing out represents the anxiety that an event might occur and that you might not know about it, just as a consequence of not being on social media. This is not necessarily a positive term, it leads to checking social media constantly, getting in the loop, and feeling the need to keep your life updated. FOMO often arises from unhappiness, people with low levels of satisfaction of the needs like competence, autonomy, and relatedness towards high levels of missing out compared to the ones with lower levels of general mood and life satisfaction.
FOMO leads people to constantly check social media when they wake up, during meals and when they go to bed. Therefore, people look to social media as an escape and a way to feel better, but the problem there is that social media only makes a person feel worse. FOMO also tends to make people compare their lives with the standards given by society. Montesquieu said, “If only one wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.” It is fundamental to stop paying attention to the people around and how they expect each one to live, it might seem hard, but the evidence of how others are doing is simply because people seem to care about it.
Social comparisons are destructive to how we perceive ourselves and remind each individual constantly how below they are from being average. The problem with FOMO is that people look into social media for happiness, but people don’t find it and constantly keep checking for a spark of it. People are looking on the outside instead of the inside, people look around and compare to others, losing authenticity. This fear keeps people from participating in the real world as authentic people. Happiness is determined by where you look and pay attention to. Attention is what holds life together, and the scarcity of attentional resources simply means that each should consider how it can facilitate decision-making. People with FOMO stop paying attention to life and turn all of their attention to social media in the search for happiness.
FOMO starts with sadness, and as a way to stop it, people turn to social media. Social media just makes the problem worse and creates standards that each individual expects to meet. Social Media is not actually as bad as it is portrayed, like all things it has positive and negative sides. The negative sides tend to affect individuals’ mental health, creating nearly impossible comparisons to others. Social media is a tool and the effectiveness of it depends on the user.
