FOMO or Don’t have fun without me

We were always aware, to some extent, that there is always something going on, there’s always some cool concert or festival, parties to attend, places to visit and new things to try. Still, the internet and all the social platforms made it all follow us around 24/7 being just a click away. It somehow works in a contradictory way. Even when we are present somewhere we tend to miss out on things because we might be on our phones all the time or we’re too busy sharing pictures of those moments for others to see, instead of enjoying them ourselves by being in the moment 100%. When we are not there or doing something cool and instagraming it, we usually check out what others are up to and that’s when we get this cold feeling rolling down our spine. The fear of missing out. Yes, FOMO officially exists and can be added to the list of things modern age brought upon us. You know like restless leg syndrome and other terms your grandma may not believe are real. So why are we all freaking out? It would be fair to say that people have been aware of their mortality since, well, the beginning of humans. Still, we tend to neglect that fact so that our everyday lives would be easier.

At some point and at a certain age that fact comes to hunt us and we start panicking and thinking about wether we have done everything we could have done. Nowadays, when the time seems to be moving so much faster and we live in the era of megalomania and hyper production, it seems like we should have a daily dose of freaking out about our lives. Why is that happening? The fact that we share such a big part of our lives online makes us slightly depressed if we spend a few days without a cool picture posted or without checking in to some cool bar/restaurant/club. We have the need for audience. Doing something for ourselves and for the joy of doing it doesn’t seem to satisfy us anymore. We’ll measure the success and how much fun we had by the numbers of likes and comments. We will put our best foot forward and show the world specifically chosen moments that have often been staged, edited and filtered. Through all that editing, have we lost touch with reality? Probably yes. If we would realise that all those posts don’t represent someone’s real life but the selection of its best moments, we probably wouldn’t have terms like FOMO. What are we really missing out on? Are we worried about not living our lives to the fullest or just worried about looking like our lives are boring to our Instagram followers? If we would sometimes switch our phones, turn off our egos and actually just lived, it would all get better even without a filter.

#IGuaranteeIt

This article was originally written by Ivona for Red Milk Magazine.