It was early April, and I was sitting on a beach in Clearwater, Florida, reading a book and listening to the waves curl repeatedly onto the shore. Beside me, my sister reclined in her beach chair with her sunhat over her face like Indiana Jones. We were enjoying a perfect spring break day, not a cloud or a shark in sight.
My phone blinked, letting me know I’d gotten a Facebook notification. “I was invited to a bonfire tomorrow,” I said unnecessarily. We weren’t flying home for another three days.
Katie moved the hat a few inches to the left and squinted at me. “Are you getting BOGO?” she asked.
“What?” I repeated. “What is BOGO?”
Then she laughed. “Buy One Get One. But that’s not what I meant.”
I didn’t find her mixing up of the acronyms so funny when I realized what she had actually been trying to say. “You were trying to say FOMO, weren’t you,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” she said in a sing-song voice, returning her hat to its spot over her eyes.
“I do NOT have FOMO,” I protested.
Sure, bonfires are fun. But we were in Florida. Who would wish to be somewhere else?
FOMO stands for Fear Of Missing Out. According to an Eventbrite research study, almost 70 percent of millennials experience FOMO when they’re unable to attend an event friends or acquaintances are attending. The researchers posit this may be because of our generation’s tendency to value experiences more than possessions.
Most people would deem prioritizing experiences over material possessions a positive mindset. In fact, research shows that spending money on experiences instead of possessions will actually make us happier. Now, the problem—if we want to call it a problem—is that a person can only be one place at a time. That means millennials—who our Baby Boomer counterparts like to call indecisive and unreliable—have to choose what to do with our time.
J.R.R. Tolkien famously wrote, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” Simple, and yet profound. And absolutely true.
When it comes to our leisure activities, we often choose something fun to do then scroll through social media during or after our activity wondering if we chose the *most* fun thing to do. Or, worse, people bail on their original plans when something better comes up. Then they probably scroll through Instagram during or after that event, too, and still wonder if they chose well. Either way, a lot of the times people feel that no matter what they are doing, they could be doing something better or more fun.
None of these people are actually missing out on better or more fun experiences. Here it is in a stupidly simple fashion: you can only ever enjoy an experience that you are experiencing.
You can’t enjoy a concert you aren’t attending by looking at pictures of it on somebody else’s Instagram account. You can only enjoy the coffee shop where you are right now with some close friends who are laughing about something stupid that happened yesterday.
FOMO is all in your head. Be where you are. Choose to enjoy whatever it is that you’re doing! That’s it! The act of wondering if something else would be more fun is actually what is ruining your fun.
Those annoying happy people who always seem to enjoy whatever they’re doing know the secret. They don’t wish they were somewhere else. They just decide what they want to do, and they decide to enjoy it.
Banish FOMO from your mind because that’s the only place it exists.
