Overcoming FOMO.
June 1st, 2009
You will always be missing out.
Twice in two days I’ve had conversations in this vein. First, I talked with a fellow who jokingly said he can’t clear out his RSS feeds unread because “I have FOMO. Fear of missing out!” Then today, in response to something I wrote the other day about using our finite supply of attention, another guy quoted the great inventor Dean Kamen:
“Everyone is missing out on something.”
And that’s fine.
We pass this way but once. You can’t read all the books you’d like to read that come out this year, much less go back and raid the shelves for the old ones you missed. You can’t watch every movie, read every blog post, meet every neat person, eat at every great restaurant, et cetera ad infinitum.
You know this. I know this. The only sensible thing to do is to take in what we can absorb in a day and not worry about the rest. Over time, we ought to get better at figuring out what to imbibe and what to ignore. If we’re really savvy about it, we’ll periodically return to first principles, evaluate what we’ve been doing against our life goals, and tweak accordingly.
So, take a look at your inbox, your RSS feeds, your bookmarks, or even just the magazines on your coffee table. Happiness may reside in deciding what to skip. FOMO is not your friend.
~
(Photo by Nic McPhee, used under a CC-Share Alike license.)
June 2nd, 2009 at 3:52 pm
Great post, Tim! A firm believer of living in the now, I love this line: “Happiness may reside in deciding what to skip.”
I also really enjoyed your post about using our finite supply of attention. With seemingly infinite amounts of information out there, we must realize that we can only take in so much.
Linked to that post I found “Time is the resource, but attention is the problem” which I also really enjoyed. Especially this bit about time being irreplaceable:
“Other resources are fungible, but not time. If you lose money, you can make more money. If you lose a valued member of your team, you can cover for them to some degree, and you can go find another talented person who can succeed them. But if you lose time . . . it’s gone forever.”
June 2nd, 2009 at 10:30 pm
Thanks for your comment, Amber. You can tell this theme has been on my mind for a long time.
Taped to the keyboard of my laptop is this motto:
“Lost time is never found again.”
June 4th, 2009 at 12:45 am
A long time ago I read a story that Norman V. Peale told on himself: When he traveled, every night before going to bed in the hotel, he had to check the door lock THREE times to be sure it was locked! Of course, he was saying, This is a waste of time. Not being able to move on without reading or checking every thing is kin to OCD - and as Amber so capably brings to our attention, losing time is not what we want to do.
My dad and sister both suffered from OCDs, but my mom was a free spirit. Guess which one enjoyed her life more?
Keep me thinking, Tim!
June 5th, 2009 at 8:40 am
FOMO — great to have a label for that syndrome.
I got rid of the magazines on the coffee table by getting rid of the table. Unfortunately now there’s a stack of magazines in a basket but when the stack reaches the top of the basket I toss the bottom half. Not perfect but at least keeps that box in check without inducing too much FOMO.
Thanks for your always interesting posts.
June 6th, 2009 at 6:06 am
[…] FOMO (fear of missing out) ? X […]
January 5th, 2010 at 7:36 am
[…] The big problem yesterday was that I let myself get derailed in my RSS reader. I’m very good at cherry-picking from all the many items that show up in Google Reader for me (I follow more than 100 feeds), and I’m even good at using the nuclear “Mark All as Read” button to clear out the backlog from time to time. No FOMO for me, in other words. […]