FOMO. Another acronym us Millennials have created for another feeling we overly experience in day-to-day life. Fear Of Missing Out. It's why we're always on our phones, always checking our social media accounts, always butting in on conversations to get the latest gossip and news. I know I've been guilty of it.
We crave to be "in the know" and feel immensely defeated when we find out we aren't. But what is so bad about not knowing everything about everything and everyone? Why do we want to know everything? Because the sad truth of the matter is that the majority of what we want to know about is gossip either putting someone down or highlighting something they aren't proud about. We fear missing out on information that will make us in some sick way feel better about ourselves. The misfortunes of others make us feel a little better about our own. Now, that's just not cool.
Okay, you can argue that's not the case and I agree that it isn't always the case. You can claim your FOMO stems from missing out on making memories with your friends, missing out one those moments that will be the origin of inside jokes that will last months, missing out on the moments everyone talks about for the next 3 months or missing moments that will never be repeated in time. But what's healthy about being so upset about something in the past? You can't go back and that's okay, because you were making your own memories -- even if that was laying in bed watching Netflix, I'm sure you were enjoying yourself.
What I'm trying to say is that our generation needs to stop worrying about things we can't control and FOMO is one of the biggest results of that. We worry about what we don't know; we spend endless hours worrying about the past and we need to stop. I know this is so much harder said than done and I can't tell you how many hours of the day I spend worrying, too. The brief moments of clarity, though, the moments sitting in my dorm with my friends laughing at stupid things for hours, the moments just sitting outside taking in the beautiful sights of campus in the fall and the students all moving together as if in sync -- those are the moments that matter. The little things that make us happy and pause our worrying for a moment are what we should aim for, not knowing everything about everything and being in every inside joke.
