Many people have noted one of social distancing’s benefits is no longer worrying about FOMO, the fear of missing out.
Indeed, the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction that we no longer envy people engaged in wild or spontaneous behaviors, we chastise them by using their spring breaks as public examples of selfishness and arrogance.
I’ve long suffered from FOMO.
I still feel the hurt from learning that my first grade class continued their lessons without me when I stayed home for a week with the chickenpox. It was the first time I realized the world goes on without me; it seemed so unfair.
Since then FOMO has manifested itself in other ways like my peculiar case of seating anxiety (the worry upon arriving at a seat-yourself restaurant that I will not have a place to sit), or worrying in college that we’d run out of beer before everyone was ready to pass out.
Could you imagine anything worse than a sober conversation with your closest friends on topics you all enjoy? The thought still sends shivers down my spine.
Now my fears of missing out primarily focus on my thirteen-month-old child’s development. I have a nagging paranoia that she’ll miss something crucial because I forgot to expose her to something important like the outside world or other people.
I set calendar alerts for library class registrations and cart her around to museums and aquariums with a rigid regularity trying to expose her to things that neutral experts have labeled as important.
FOMO is natural. We all have it.
But when left unchecked, FOMO can make you miserable. That’s why, even before social distancing became the latest craze, I’ve practiced JOMO: The Joy of Missing Out.
It feels good to let go of parts of your life. To watch something that has taken up great amounts of your time just float off into the distance knowing that you’ll never need to worry about it again.
Here’s a partial list of some of the things I choose to joyfully miss out on:
- Sports – I used to know the names of professional athletes. What a hassle! One of my favorite moments of every week is moving the sports section from my Sunday newspaper right into the discard pile without even giving it a glance.
- Action movies – Spoiler alert: the good guy wins.
- Math – Nope, not for me!
- Crime-solving entertainment – I’ve never seen an episode of CSI or Law and Order. I’ve never listened to a cold case podcast, and I didn’t watch the OJ Simpson miniseries that people were obsessed with. But I do have theories on which relatives are most likely to be linked to a crime if I ever do one of those DNA geneology tests.
- Video Games – I haven’t bought one in at least ten years and when I did it was to play bocce and beer pong on the Wii.
- Music created after 2003 – and that’s just because it’s the year I graduated college and stopped paying attention.
If you haven’t recently cut something entirely out of your life (on purpose, not ‘cause of the ‘rona), I highly recommend trying it.
After a while you get a sense for it and can start blocking things before they ever even cross your consciousness threshold.
Just this weekend I added another item to my list of things I will joyfully never know about: Tiger King. I don’t even need to know what that is to know it’s not for me. It truly is a joyful feeling.
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