FOMO
It’s as common as breathing; people are so afraid of missing out that they finally admit they are suffering from FOMO: Fear of Missing Out. I have seen it ad nauseum. Friends check their phones before bed, during the night and again when they get up to pee for the 11th time.
What if that video of the monkeys grabbing the owner’s glasses is missed? Or is the chance to do Wordle in 2 missed? Heaven forbids if we guess the word as lousy instead of noisy and the coworkers find out at the water cooler. We could never survive that mistake. Might as well turn in our company resignation papers as well.
FOMO at its best.
I witness it daily, especially at the dinner table at a diner. Friends, especially those born after 1970, are concerned about being left out. As some great politician stated: “Give me my phone or give me death. I will fight the outcome.”
I am old enough to remember the days before portable phones. If someone said to give them a ring, it did NOT mean call me on my portable device. It meant finding a respected jeweler.
Today, put a group of millennials in a circle and make them put their cell phones in a basket to collect after the meeting. They will start going into convulsions, sweating like a reprobate in church with withdrawals until they are able to get their portable device and see the video of the mama elephant, stomping the crocodile with the baby elephant in its jaws.
I have reached the point that AI concerns me dearly since I have seen videos of coaches and all-star athletes being pronounced dead when I just saw them 2 nights ago. It makes me believe even more in the story of Lazarous. I wish I could eliminate the FOMO.
Where do you go for relief?
How about the source? That’s a pretty good start. It’s called getting it from the horse’s mouth, Not from the orifice on the opposite end of the horse.
When I was on the staff at Alabama, we had a co-worker we referred to as “Scoop.” He spent his waking hours, chasing down rumors of possible job openings. In other words, he was the poster child of FOMO.
College coaches can be brutal, when it comes to FOMO. It happened almost daily with Scoop. When he was coming down the hall, one of the other coaches would bring up the name of an assistant who was rumored to get a head coaching position. When Scoop would overhear the “rumor,” the story got legs. Before lunch, the so-called breaking story had the assistant as the new coach at Florida or LSU and was in the process of putting his staff together. With Scoop as a coordinator.
Again, Fear of Missing Out.
I had a friend who loved visiting the Flora-Bama Bar in Orange Beach, Alabama on a daily basis. He would come home to his condo with a bunch of his golfing friends from the Flora Bama About midnight, he would get antsy about missing out on some fun so he would call an Uber to take him back to the state line to make sure he didn’t miss anything.
Too often, he had his beer goggles on and had to be helped back to another Uber to transport him to the infamous Waffle House and later to his condo. Unfortunately, he never knew what he missed out on.
As we age, missing out isn’t nearly as important as it was years ago. I had a good friend make a profound statement recently:
“Let’s not go out but say we did.”
No one will ever know what we missed out on.
It’s like a preacher skipping church to play golf and getting a hole-in-one.
Who can he tell?
Would that be FOMO?