When You Have the Opposite of FOMO

Reflections on the difference between being alone and lonely.

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The last stretch of the pandemic unfolded as a groggy and exhausting process of crawling toward the light, totally and miserably unstuck in time. Beneath the frantic redressing of all the things we could no longer do or enjoy, we were all cornered into a haphazard balancing act of remembering to be grateful for what comforts we do have and devising new ways to grasp at happiness. Chasing happiness, as I’ve come to learn, is a fool’s errand for the same reason why the stars we see are only present cataclysms, the light of an untouchable past. Happiness is something we experience in hindsight, a consequence of being fully connected with the present around us. We seek this feeling because of a shared perception that everyone else is having more fun, living their #bestlife, or experiencing better happenings. This feeling is more colloquially known as the dreaded “FOMO,” a popularized phenomenon that describes an irrational anxious attachment to do whatever it is we’re not currently doing. We may feel this because we saw something seemingly cool on the internet; it can also apply to affixing our self-worth and identity to arbitrary benchmarks—also thrust onto you at some point on the internet.

While a return to “normal” slogged slowly towards us, the occasional text had flashed across my iPhone, invites from more restless and wistful friends eager to backyard grill or guzzle patio beers or do anything more titillating than binging Parks and Recreation for the -nth time and bragging about it on a Bumble virtual date. At this inflection point, I should’ve descended into a nerve-wracking impetus to indulge in the transient fantasies of my previous life. Somehow, oddly, I have transitioned into a serene mental state that is the polar opposite of FOMO. Whatever this metamorphosis was, I experienced a sudden urge to ward off these solicited and unsolicited invitations and say “no” or “we’ll see.”

When you’re swept in the bustle of urbanity, getting whipped up in the scorched-earth Sisyphean quest to Always Be Doing Something seems more inevitable than possible. The times without structure or certitude are a glimpse into the frightening blank of existence, so terrifying you can’t stand it for long, like staring at Donald Trump staring straight into a solar eclipse.

The grand techno-joke of modernity is that we’ve convinced ourselves our every activity makes for enthralling content. This insatiable quest to optimize our every living moment leads us to constantly tinker with our surroundings until it becomes the perfect backdrop to broadcast our best selves. LinkedIn has mutated into a tedious and ubiquitous competition to project the enviable mix of work hard and play hard — the ineffable glow of achievement that prompts people to comment, I want your life. Instagram is a vacuous, cushy hell brimming with live streams of meal preps and morning routines, or 15-second snippets of beat-drops and the ritualistic cheers-ing of brunchtime mimosas. Twitter is a neverending brain aneurysm of grown adults compulsively farting their ids out through their nostrils.

The condition of “adulting,” as much as twenty- and thirty-somethings struggle with both its concept and execution, presents an odd Venn diagram: It is an overlapping of thrill, choice paralysis, and the conflation of action with motion. The Greek philosopher Epictetus said, “You become what you give your attention to,” which applies to both the selfie-taker staring into their camera phone and the shrugging, sighing voyeur passively scrolling through images of people doing so.

In regards to fixating on the Twitter-24/7 news cinematic universe, there is a fairly common sentiment amongst the Very Online that asserts it’s a privilege to “log off” and not constantly napalm yourself with a ceaseless stream of thermonuclear headlines. Sure, willful ignorance is a luxury for those who remain largely unscathed from the brute, idiotic force of American sadism. Though I’d argue it’s a privilege to delude yourself into thinking that posting-as-activism is any different than a hooting fan calling into “Mike and the Mad Dog” to blather about who the Yankees traded for—at least in the sense that they have as little connection to the Yankees’ roster management as you do to the machinations of power. The internet has turned us into serfs who are allowed to scream at the castle wall.

The average American invests themselves in psychotically frivolous pursuits with a totalizing blank sociopathy; this is a land brimming with brooding hedonists who believe the sum total of human happiness is constant convenience and instant ego gratification. This fuels the capitalist engine, an attempt to create Heaven in the material present, which is mostly unimpeded comfort and distance from any kind of unpleasant conflict that would humble or compromise the individual will. People are convinced that buying a new iPhone for $1,300 will keep their insecurities at bay, that documenting their pursuits will immortalize and mythologize them. We are all personal brands. Culture is an all-encompassing, highly immersive pop-up shop. We are decadent subjects of self-reinforcement trying to establish a little sphere of influence within an uncaring nightmare realm.

FOMO is the thirst and the quench — we feel compelled to document both, perhaps because we are fundamentally lonely. Almost everything we do on social media is either manic or of little consequence. The internet can be a crowded prism of hothouse arguments, filled with buzzing troll mutants who blink a lot and absolutely lose their shit about opinions so mundane and context-specific that they don’t scan as anything beyond shrill and whining litanies of incredulous aggrievement. Posting is mostly ego flattery, a type of pseudo-conviction that morphs you into an “I just smoked a seed blunt and here’s what I think” person.

But out of quixotic obligation or a relapse into FOMO, I felt compelled to always be checking something: I had to know what was happening, when it happens, people’s opinions on the matter, and people’s opinions of my opinions on it—even if its only consequences include an erased sense of not-knowing things and fodder for more interesting party conversations. It turns out that connectivity and connection have nothing in common beyond a shared etymological root. The attendant incentives and tidal pull of social media perversely conspire to make connection both the opposite and enemy of connectivity. Our camera phones, our curated realities, our precious opinions, our streaming preferences have become psychically fused with our identities. We consume our very existence through the soft glow of our pocket supercomputers. There isn’t a more apt summation of this predicament than Neil Postman’s “amusing ourselves to death.”

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We are gifted unlimited and unfettered access to boundless knowledge, control over our schedules and commitments, the potential to contact anyone anywhere, to master a craft, this awesome power to maximize every situation and our success and happiness. Yet, we find ourselves more lonely and stagnant than ever. Ultimately, though, technology isn’t solely responsible for rendering us lonely; it is accompanied by a culture that encourages us to feel a sense of shame for being physically isolated. The jovial camaraderie and laughter we see in our refreshing timelines or the snapshots we post are hardly proof of our alleviated loneliness; this is evidence of the desperate lengths some will go to hide the fact that we’re irremediably alone.

Along with impermanence, loneliness is a profound tragedy of the human condition — something we all share. In a literal sense, loneliness is a tragedy of space. More presciently, it is a feeling that no one can ever get to know the under-the-skin, around-the-clock version of you. Loneliness foregoes connection for connectivity, even if the latter leaves you with an unfulfilled desire that curdles into loathing and resignation that’s directed inward. The electric voltage that sparks connection is reversed, paralyzing like a Taser. The authentic self walls itself from others. The FOMO drags you into social situations for their own sake, the FOMO compels you to relate through hot-takes. Your interaction with the outside world is now turned tense and terse. Broadcasting your selectively authentic self may determine whether you are someone worth following, but only genuine connection can confirm whether you are someone worth knowing.

Our social feeds are a window into our lives, but they can never be an entrance into our deepest selves. The brilliance of Infinite Jest lies in the novel’s fixation on individuals and the overarching unity of their disparate expressions of despair, caused by their inability to escape a terrifying and soulless world empty of connection and full of addiction to pleasure stimulation. The seduction of internet entertainment and briefly satisfying FOMO are both incredibly powerful. Each presents a simulated version of the shared consciousness we are all thrust into unknowingly and unwittingly—but on our terms and without any negative emotional consequence.

Experiencing suffering is a prerequisite to understanding that life is suffering. It takes maturity and insight and luck to acknowledge that you can’t flee from suffering forever. People reach this realization through repeated exposure to traumas and horrors — both benign and behemoth — and this happens through seeking pleasures and not attaining them, or through seeking pleasures and attaining them and then realizing they are insufficient. The degree to which humanity is redeemable is the degree to which we can navigate this process.

Nowadays, you can opt into a solipsistic digital realm, which exists as this final frontier of fantasy within a fantasy, where we can escape and seek some meaning—except whatever we find is a copy of a copy of a copy, a pale simulacrum. On a symbolic level, if you can build a parallel universe with the same system of rewards and satisfaction as real life, a lot of people will opt in. This is much more convenient than answering questions about who you are, what you can do in the world, how you can apply your mind and your soul, how you can reach out to others and be potentially rejected, how to build a strong enough self-image to withstand that rejection and emerge stronger from defeat. This is how we gain talent and wisdom and love, but this process is also scary. Failure can wield an overwhelming power.

What I have found during physical isolation and detaching from social media is that loneliness heightens the conversations we have with ourselves. Spared from content that panders to our impulses to judge, partitioned from obligatory and suboptimal social situations, we begin to drift away from life’s bombarding bombast and develop a more authentic point of view.

Loneliness also makes us more capable of intimacy, for when we discover who we truly are, we reassess our priorities, beat back FOMO in the way light conquers darkness, and choose the interactions that give us meaning. Intimacy is the opposite of loneliness, something that can be achieved when one fully grapples with the inherent loneliness of our existence, an act of love that stems from self-love. Each deeper connection creates deeper character: It creates more room to grow, more things to lose, more paths to take.

For as multiply horrific and disheartening as the pandemic has been, all this newfound and unwelcome freedom sent me reeling back to Square One, affording me the opportunity to second-guess all the big questions I thought I had already answered. I leveraged my isolation to focus on goal-oriented behavior rather than pursue outcome-oriented goals. The latter is something you follow, the former is something you do. It is also hard to determine which goals are really your own. When you attach your self-worth to society-imposing definitions of success, you postpone your own happiness and place it outside of your control. The transcendent experiences of connection and happiness will have to arise from your personal life, an intersection of your past and presence and emotion that are fully embedded within that moment — defined by your reality and shared with others. “This freedom would always be offered, as long as I was sturdy enough to assume it,” Patti Smith writes.

There weren’t many positives to extract from this pandemic, and the influencers who tried to convince you otherwise were either lying to you or lying to themselves, or both. But this extra free time that would otherwise be sucked into the mindless inertia of our previous lives has afforded us the opportunity to feel neutral and empty. It is such an exhilarating relief to break the clammy paralysis of fear and begin a self-conscious journey of renewal and regeneration. It is by no means a finished process, but letting go of external attachment is the first step toward finding internal liberation and flawless self-expression. More crucially, it allows you to find the infinite inside of enough. Only then will FOMO fade into a gray twilight that you weren’t sure why you gravitated toward in the first place.

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