What Is Linguistic FOMO, Is That Really A Thing?
We all are haunted by what-if scenarios.
You know those moments in your life where you wished you would’ve gone to that party — or when you should’ve bought that car, only to find later that someone else bought right after you walked away. We all have those micro-regrets splattered in and through our lives. But, why the hell do we care so much? What is operating under the hood? What is driving us to continuously feel like we’re missing out on something good, over there?
I am a behavioral economist & social psychologist — and I experience FOMO about every hour in a day. I want to be where life is. I want to be the life of the party and I need to get there any way I can. But, the reality is we are not infinite beings — we are not gods. If anything, the fear of missing out is a reminder of our frail mortality — we’re all going to die, and that’s okay. But, while we’re alive, we need to be bacchanalian about living, right?
What if we screwed that up? What if living for the now isn’t what its all cracked up to be and Eckhart Tolle is full of shit in the Power of Now? Well, not quite. You see, the fear of missing out is a form of cultural cancer that we all begin to absorb into our experiences and materializes into our daily lives and has a major effect on how we make decisions, and amplifies anxiety in our lives.
Hell, it normalizes anxiety to the point that, after a while, we don’t know how to live without it. How does that work? Its like etching pathways into our brains that create highways of habits, behaviors, and beliefs that we begin to identify as part of who we are. That’s why it takes a lot of work to ‘change your mind’. Because your brain gets high off of habits.
It shoots reward drugs like dopamine, serotonin, and cortisol that feels like the best high you could ever experience — short of snorting cocaine — hear palpitations included. You know those habits we were just talking about, your brain — it won’t change a thing; because it gets stuck in a feedback loop, like listening to the same song over and over again. You are rewarding yourself for not changing. Why do we fear change? Because we fear the unknown. Old habits are fucking hard to assassinate — they’re worse than a character out of a horror film.
Plus, we live in a society that worships the idea of being ourselves. We are our own worst idols. We have a top 10 list for almost everything under the sun, from songs to movies, from needles to threads, we are weaving a blanket we shouldn’t want to sleep under. We have people in a billion-dollar industry who’s sole purpose for making money is to personally develop you — really? A job they get paid for is to make you focus more on you?
So, we are not only stuck in endless neuro-loops, we have a society that does all it can to make sure we stay there so we helplessly give money blindly to strangers who need us to believe in the idea that staying the same is the best way to go. We’re fucked.
There is something else that we need to address here, something that has been guiding our understanding since we were all infants in the womb of the universe — language. It promises what it can never deliver. It promises that we can get what we want by using it. It has us making promises we can’t keep.
It falls short all the time — but, we keep using it. It promises us clarity in our communication but confuses the hell out of those we love. It has us building bridges that we burn down in a second by using the same thing that built the bridge in the first place.
Language is confusing and confused.
Language exiles us from the object of our desire. Language tries and tries to give us what we want and dies on the way to the mirage. Why is language important to understanding FOMO?
Because, there is such a thing as linguistic FOMO, and our culture has shitloads of it. How do I know? Because of Carson Daly. Carson-Fucking-Daly. No, that’s not his real middle name, but this TV personality will teach us all we need to know about linguistic FOMO.
It’s a term we made up (not the FOMO part), and we’re creating Behavioral Nudges to force it away from individuals and businesses. Oh, there also was an article that was recently exploring his relationship with his wife and how they self-imposed what he referred to as ‘sleep divorce’ — yes, you heard that right!
Okay, so what the heck is sleep divorce? It sounds like something that would crop up on a General Hospital episode. The idea is that couples make a conscious (that’s a buzzword, right now) decision to not sleep in the same beds — and possibly not have sex. But, it’s not revolutionary. It was a Victorian practice. The puritans did it with their shoes on.
So, why the need for a new label on something that should remain dead?
Meaning. We as humans crave meaning. In the digital age, where all of our relationships now make more sense through the virtual space, we have been hypnotized by the need to make every second of our lives count.
Every…..fucking… iota.
So much so, that we now are creating a new lexicon — we have words like ghosting and catfishing that explain behavior that has been happening for centuries. We want every single thing we experience to have meaning. So, we create it. We get drunk off of it. But, there’s a problem with that, its short-live, like most fads are. This one will fade and wither until culture gives us something else to distract ourselves with.
Self-importance hurts us. It imposes the need to count the likes and dislikes of strangers and friends. Is the fear of missing out real? The experience of it, yes. Are you really missing out on something? Probably not. Sitting and thinking about it is a waste of your time. Maybe that Eckhart Tolle dude was right, all we have is right now. Now, go to that party you’re missing out on.
BIO
George Elerick is the Founder of Nudge Culture — We use behavioral nudges, applied linguistics, and social psychology to optimize human experience. He also lectures. He is holding a book club around racism and how nudges can disrupt its systematic course in America.
