Author: Boran Suekinci
Publication date: 6/17/2024
Fear of Missing Out or FOMO for short is a rising issue many people suffer from. It has many detrimental effects on people such as rising stress, anxiety, insomnia, depression, decrease in mental health or decreased productivity. However, seeing FOMO as just something that simply happens would be missing the point. It’s a problem that’s highly interwoven to our modern lifestyles surrounded by overstimulation through social media and a constant effort to keep up with things. In this article we hope to cover the reasons behind this phenomenon and what the circumstances leading up to it could imply for society in general.
What is Fear of Missing Out?
Fear of Missing Out is a relatively recent term first introduced in 2004 and has started to see a large usage in 2010 (Gupta & Sharma, 2021). It refers to, as the name suggests, a fear of missing stuff such as opportunities or events. However, one important distinction to make is that in the case of FOMO what’s being feared is not the thing that’s being missed specifically but missing something in itself. This fear of missing things and the constant effort to stay in the loop that comes with it creates a breeding ground for feelings such as a constant anxiety, a sense of inadequacy and other similar hardships.
Reasons Behind Fear of Missing Out
While there seems to be a close correlation between social media and FOMO, the source of FOMO itself doesn’t come from social media. Rather social media seems to amplify FOMO to an immense degree. However, the actual reason behind FOMO seems to be a fundamental desire for belonging which all humans share.
Humans have an evolutionary need to form connections and belong as building communities was how humanity survived in nature. In the case of FOMO, this need for belonging turns the feeling of missing things into a sense of exclusion from others. This sense of exclusion can come in many different forms such as not feeling as successful as others or feeling that your life isn’t as exciting as others.
Fear of Missing Out and Social Media
Many studies show that social media has a massive influence on FOMO and people who use more social media seem to have bigger chances of going through FOMO. There are various reasons for this. And these reasons seem to stem from the interplay between the aforementioned desire for belonging and the nature of social media.
While social media gives people the opportunity to connect with others around the world at incredible speeds, this connection doesn’t seem to substitute for face-to-face connection. There are aspects to face-to-face communication such as physical cues and personal presence which social media interactions can’t replicate. Therefore, interactions over social media doesn’t seem to fulfill our psychological needs for connection.
This lack of fulfillment can cause dissatisfaction and anxiety. These feelings can end up creating a cycle where the person delves into social media further in order to seek validation, amplify their feelings of isolation, therefore, seek more validation and in a way get stuck in an endless effort to catch up creating FOMO.
Fear of Missing Out and Social Media Personas
Another important aspect about the relationship between social media and FOMO is that the image social media gives of other people’s lives is a distorted image made of their highest moments. In other words, the stuff people usually share on social media are not their daily routine but the most extreme parts of all the things they are going through. However, constantly being bombarded about the highest moments of other people’s lives without being shown anything about their daily lives would give rise to a feeling of lagging behind others, feeling excluded and creating a Fear of Missing Out.
Furthermore the rapid, unending and constant updates about the events around us to the point of overwhelmsion from social media increases this sense of lagging behind and the feeling that you’re missing out on things.
What Fear of Missing Out Tells Us
Fear of Missing Out should not only be seen as an isolated psychological phenomenon but also serve as a warning about the blank points of our heavily interconnected world. While we get to connect with the world through social media, the way these interactions are happening is far from perfect. Walls such as misrepresentation of people’s lives and the rapidly stimuli bombarding nature of social media turns social media into a distorted and a much more stress inducing imagery of the real world. This distorted imagery of real life isolates its users from real life and causes problems such as FOMO due to this change in people’s perception.
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