My Experience With FOMO

By John Pearson on November 17, 2015

College promises a seemingly endless source of potentially constant entertainment.

You name it, there’s a club for it. Thursday through Saturday, parties rage long into the night. Sororities and fraternities engage in constant events and parties. It all boils down to a stylized Instagram post with a caption about how “unforgettable” and “amazing” the moment was. How they are “living life to the fullest.”

While always an advocate of some good old Carpe Diem, I regret our transfixation of this new one. This feeling that every moment of your life should be worth a photo, because you are living so vibrantly. Ultimately, it seems less a need to live life to the fullest, and more an obsession with living it correctly.

Recently, I was invited to attend a sorority formal dance. I had to get dressed hours in advance because I so rarely dress so far above my homely hoi polloi look. At first, I am somewhat unable to move, like a dog that has been put in a life vest (if you haven’t tried it, I would highly recommend the experience. A memorable Sunday afternoon if ever there were one). I lie still for about half an hour, then pace about my room in a sort of robotic walk, getting used to the confinement of the clothes. Ultimately, I am able to affect a comfortable demeanor.

On the bus to the event, I made more introductions than any other time in recent memory. The Erics, Jacks, Sarahs, and Laurens all blend together now (perhaps thanks to my friend Jim Beam, whom I met that night as well), but my short-term memory is rather impressive if I don’t say so myself, and for a few hours I could have been a Rolodex android.

Regardless, they were laughing and gossiping, touching and making out, tripping and stumbling (obviously they had run into Jim, too). One thing became clear: they were determined to have fun. They really wanted to. They were mid-execution on this enjoyment plan, and no one could hold them from what they wanted.

The rest of the ride and the arrival at the club where the event was being held have been taped over in my memory by the intense need to pee I bore until the bathrooms at the club (Jim can be a rotten friend sometimes). In the bathroom, I saw people doing cocaine for the first time in my life. They were getting “amped up” and “ready” for the evening’s happenings.

Needless to say, I skipped out on the experience and left to find my date (there’s a pun about “long lines for/in the bathroom here, but it escapes me at present). I found my date, and we sat and watched the others dance for the majority of the evening. She, like I, had no desire to bounce in the sweaty, bouncing mob. Watching them dance, I saw something very important that I truly wished I hadn’t.

It wasn’t about wanting to have fun. It wasn’t about wanting to live life to the fullest. It wasn’t even about releasing tension after a week of cooped-up studying. Watching their faces, their movements, I saw something worse than desire: necessity.

They looked like they needed to have fun. They needed to live life to the fullest. Something was driving these people to an endlessly unsatiated appetite for whatever feeling they had that I didn’t. Whatever feeling you get in a dark frat house basement scored by deafening beat drops that you don’t in your chair reading a book, or going for a walk alone. It seemed that they needed it to forget that they were sad.  And they were sad.  They were sad in the way middle aged couples on luxury cruises are sad: looking for substance in life where they have been told it lies.

This, to me, is the source of our generation’s tension, our discontent. Throughout our structured childhoods, we have consumed this image of what it means to live life correctly, from films, television, books, websites, social media, and any other windows we turned to when we felt constrained and confused.

We believed in a combination lock to which there is one code for everyone, and through this lock lies everyone’s definition of happiness. That this fast-paced culture of split-second smiles, when maintained as often as possible, will lead us to the promised land, when the camera pulls back and the mid-2000s pop song starts playing.

Now, when we can’t seem to realize why these things that other people find fun aren’t making us feel better, making us feel fulfilled. We’ve been lied to by companies telling us that buying and having their products is the right direction. What we’ve wanted to believe for so long, what we’ve finally had the chance of having, is not real. And it makes us angry. But it doesn’t make us change.

There are no solutions to feeling unfulfilled, to the fear of missing out that drives people to this condemnation to happiness that I can offer. But, I can remind you to be “happiness literate,” understanding that what you see and hear and interpret as happiness and fulfillment for someone else may not fulfill you.

Only you can know what works and what doesn’t for you. Anyone who tells you differently is wrong. Or wants something.

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