The dangers of FOMO

I vividly remember the feeling of FOMO(Fear of Missing Out) on Friday nights during my sophomore engineering years. I would grind out my classes during the week and on Saturdays and Sundays. Friday nights were an optimization problem reserved for maximizing the amount of fun I could possibility have.

With an engineering mindset, I calculated how much money I spent per hour existing on campus. It amounted to roughly 9.5 dollars an hour after dividing housing and tuition by the amount of time I was roughly awake. While I felt good spending my time in the classroom as the hourly college rate ticked on, the hourly college existence fee loomed over my shoulder during Friday nights.

In I was well aware of the Uber fees, random expenses, and the late night snacks that a Friday night would cost. Further compounding my Friday FOMO was the mounting workload that awaited me Saturday morning. I started to dread Friday nights because having too much fun was becoming stressful. Every Friday has to be wilder, crazier, and more absurd than the previous one. I had to chill with all the cliques, sample all the scenes, and get high in all the weird locations. I had to manufacture all the positive college Friday night experiences, immerse myself in them, and commit them to all memory so my future self won’t have any regrets.

On Friday nights, I had this strategy of purposely making things as new as possible by seeking out weird and sketchy experiences. When I went out, I would plan not having a plan as much as possible. I would plan out all the variables that could go wrong and make sure that things would take weird turns. Instead of Ubering home, I would instead on walking through cemeteries and highways to get back home. Instead of knowing where to go for the night, I would insist on trying to get into the most exclusive parties by pretending to be a beer delivery service. Whenever I saw a river I would swim across it. Whenever I saw an interesting building I would try to climb it. I became known as the crazy party guy for my antics.

Originally, my Friday night FOMO was the standard work hard play hard FOMO caused by the college lifestyle and cost of living. Now my FOMO became a how do I experience every possible situation that a person can experience. I saw value in every moment. I thought everything was a learning experience. I started seeking experiences outside of just Fridays. I wanted my whole life to be an experience.

I would interact with anarchists, socialists, environmentalists, wall-street wannabes, wall-street willactuallybes, Facebook tryhards, boxing bros, that weird kid, that cool kid, that stoner kid, that weird cool stoner kid, the hodl-gang, the dancers, the chronically asleep, the you-know-lowkey-he-sells-more-drugs-than-weed-but-he-says-he-only-sells-weed, the sad guys, the sad girls, the optimistic, the green energy entrepreneur, the guy-thats-super-good-at-pushing-people-to-be-their-best, the social justice warrior,and the-really-likes-living-in-the-Midwest-chick.

Over my sophomore year, I collected experiences and experienced experiences. Friday night FOMO turned into full blown everything FOMO. Life was fleeting, full of excitement and I wanted to try it all.

What exactly was I FOMOing on? Was I missing out on knowledge? Was I missing out on seeing the big picture? I tried reading all the books related to the people I met. I read the Intelligent Investor after talking to some Wall-street dudes. I read Algorithms to Live by after smoking weed with some Microsoft dudes. I read Heart of a Dog after talking to a chronically anxious indie band player after a fundraiser. I read some Nausea after giving a homeless person my corporate reimbursement card. I read some, smoked some weed, and talked some.

I tried to backpacking in the wilderness to think through all these conflicting ideas. I always felt like I was missing something. All these new experiences and perspectives tore my personality apart and made me question all my assumptions. It also made me think about everything and anything at once. My mind was racing and I was seeing patterns where I have never seen them before. I felt like I was missing the truth. I wanted to know how everything actually worked.

I wondered how deep I could go down the rabbit hole if I had FOMO all the time. I thought about brilliant minds and their search for knowledge. I thought about Nietzsche's descent into madness and David Foster Wallace’s ultimate fate. I thought about my fate if I were to search forever for experience and knowledge. The existential dread started to seep in. I was deeply confused and unhappy. My mood swung wildly and I was extremely unfocused.

Then I found discipline as a tool. My mind was racing, but it was getting nowhere. I realized even being a good existentialist requires discipline to form well thought out and logical conclusions. I didn’t have the mental discipline to understand all my experiences. I was trying on other people’s thoughts and jumping ship whenever I fancied new novelties. I wasn’t able to cultivate and fine tune a train of thought that was uniquely my own. I tried to create unique experiences just to feel unique. I realized by trying to experience everything and constantly searching, I was missing out on focus and development.

I started to cultivate my hobbies and discipline my philosophical thought. By having a consistent routine and setting goals for myself, I was able to form into a person that I wanted to be. I realized the danger in constantly seeking shallow experiences and novelty. Always trying new things prevented me from finding mastery in anything. I thought I was fighting the consumerist trend by not wanting things, but I become a consumer of experiences. I was comparing myself to the great thinkers, but they were producing precise and fine-tuned thought while I was merely consuming their thought and processing it in a half-assed way. All these experiences weren’t learning experiences. I haven’t learned anything except how to never commit to anything.

Given the amount of distractions in our life and all the different things we could experience, few people achieve mastery in what they do. We live in a society where novel experiences are marketed to us at the same level as products. With the constant barrage of corporate yoga classes, packaged vacation trips, hip restaurants, and cool millennial outings, it’s hard to focus on the self. While where’s nothing wrong with seeking experiences in moderation, too much consumption in experiences, especially driven by FOMO, can lead to a false sense of mastery and worldliness.

I believe we can form better experiences through depth, such as deeply understanding a field of knowledge, forming solid relationships, implementing/creating something in the world, and achieving mastery in an activity. Depth requires the experience of training versus the experience of consumption. The experience of training is a state of mind where we feel in tune and alive with the activity we’re doing. Meanwhile, the experience of consumption makes us feel bloated and distracted. Having FOMO and a constant need for new experiences will only erode our discipline and substance as a person.

I went back to Friday nights. Instead of wallowing in FOMO, I focused on developing a skill-set. I focused on learning how to write better, cook better, and move better. I want to be the person that was good at things rather than the person who has seen it all. I now feel much much happier and stable as a person.