3 Reasons Why FOMO Is The Enemy of Happiness (Replace It With JOMO Instead)

We’re tricked into believing that everything “important” deserves our attention.

Productivity experts teach us how to be ineffectively productive. Social media was designed to excite our desires, keeping us in an infinite trap of scrolling. The recent breaking news was written to tease an emotion and pull you into reading.

Everything around us is designed to ignite our fear of missing out.

FOMO, as cliche as that acronym has become, causes severe pain.

You’re tricked into believing you can do everything.

“Rather than taking ownership of our lives, we seek out distractions, or lose ourselves in busyness and the daily grind, so as to try to forget our real predicament,” writes Oliver Burkeman in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.

We believe that because we’ve been gifted time, we have an infinite amount of days to do what we’ve always wanted to do. But that’s a lie; we’re all going to die.

You’re going to have to accept your finitude. You’ll never get to enjoy everything. You’re going to miss out on nearly everything.

Learn to accept that.

Most of our fear is based on the desires that other people are modeling for us.

Social media has exponentially amplified the way we imitate desire.

We have models everywhere, which are “people or things that show us what is worth wanting,” says Luke Burgis. Or better stated, that appear to be worth wanting.

“It it is bringing our desires closer together and amplifying conflict. We are free to resist, but the mimetic forces are accelerating so quickly that we are close to becoming shackled.”

We are pulled into other people’s desires, and it’s happening at the subconscious level.

To break free, we have to learn to choose our models wisely and filter out everything else.

We live our lives in a constant stream of low-level anxiety.

It feels like we’re always running from a tiger that’s never going to eat us.

It’s ridiculous. Most anxieties can’t be traced to a triggering event, known as chronic low-level anxiety. We’re anxious for no reason. It’s become a part of who we are.

Our fears are based on the past or future that has no validation for the present.

So learn to be present and accept that most things don’t deserve your attention.

Learn to embrace the Joy Of Missing Out (JOMO).