the joy of missing out

You've heard of FOMO, right? It's a form of social anxiety that has developed in our culture. Over-simplified, someone experiencing this anxiety believes that their friends or family may be having fun without them. As with most types of anxiety, it is experienced on a sliding scale where some will be more severely affected by it than others. Your tolerance for this anxiety is entirely dependent on you as an individual.

Whilst it's not an absolute rule, having observed many friends over many years, I'd conclude that the more time you spend glued to your phone, the more likely you are to experience this anxiety. If you live for social media, spending much of your time coveting the experiences of others. If you are always hooked-in and online, glued to your glowing screen, perfecting your online persona. If you are always on the look-out for status updates, Instagram pictures and tweets, chances are you have experienced the resultant FOMO. Well it's little wonder. We live in a world where real-time updates on other people's lives are sent straight to our phones, interrupting us 24-hours a day. For me, the solution is clear.

JOMO - Joy of Missing Out. This is how you'd describe the sense of being present and content with where you are and what you are doing right now, regardless of what other people are doing. It obviously won't be applicable all of the time, but this is usually the box I find myself in. I'm totally fine with not being invited to everything. I know others will really value and appreciate the validation from others by way of an invite to everything, even if they can't make it or simply don't want to go. But personally, if I were constantly being pestered to socialise, there's a good chance I'd turn my phone off! A perfect example of this is brunch. Quite apart from anything else, I simply can't justify going on an expensive brunch visit every weekend. That's not to shame anyone who can justify this to themselves. Again, some people get a huge amount of value from spending regular time with others in this way. But for me, a walk in the park is just as valuable as a brunch date every weekend.

When you acknowledge that spending £15-to-£20 on nothing but pancakes and black coffee is practically daylight robbery, going every weekend would just be throwing £100 away every month. When you put it like that, it almost sounds ridiculous. I can imagine my mother saying, "You're spending £100 per month on pancakes and black coffee! Are you dealing drugs?" Plus the food itself, albeit a lovely tasty treat, is unhealthy and unfulfilling - both of appetite and of my fundamental values and beliefs. Lockdown, if anything, has reinforced this belief within me.

Most of my income is either spent on bills, saved away on short-to-mid term savings goals, or long-term investments. I allow myself £200 per month to spend on miscellaneous purchases, as well as for socialising and generally enjoying myself. This includes everything from a Monday morning coffee, to breakfast stops and impromptu trips to the pub. Everything I do during the month which isn't specifically budgeted for comes from this allowance, so I need to make it last. If that allowance runs dry I won't go hungry, my socialising simply stops for the rest of the month. I simply refuse to use a credit card, or in other words, go into debt, to have pancakes and black coffee for breakfast. Thankfully I haven't ended up in that spot in a while, but I am always conscious of it. It's very easy to slip into a downward spiral once you take the first step.

Personally, I've found that allowing myself any more than that doesn't make me any happier. I dare say I could even reduce this amount slightly, but I am satisfied already and so I feel no need to reduce it. But critically, I refuse to increase it. Every penny I allocate to casual spending is a penny that isn't being invested toward my financial future. So when purchasing anything, be it convenience food or material possessions, I am constantly asking myself, "is paying for this worth delaying my future financial freedom." If the answer is no, I let it go. That's not to say I don't treat myself, or that I don't purchase the things I genuinely do need, but I don't take it to the Nth degree either. Excess pancakes and black coffee won't make you any happier, but a once in a blue moon treat - I'm there!

Regardless of your reaction toward missing out, it's important to remember that neither is the "right" way to react. It's very easy for both FOMO and JOMO to be taken too far. FOMO can have you saying yes to every social outing, preventing you from making time for the things that are truly important to you. While JOMO can result in you actively saying no to most, or even all social events, pushing you to the tertiary of your social groups and making you feel disengaged with your peers. Ideally you'd be best served somewhere in the middle: enjoying what your doing right now, whilst also looking forward to your carefully curated social interactions in the near future. Yet this is not everyone's normal in today's world.

Social media can force everyone into a sense of FOMO. Say you've always wanted to take a road trip, and then you see people in Instagram doing the North Coast 500. So you log onto Facebook and see that a friend from your uni course has snagged an amazing job. A job you applied for too. So you close your laptop and head down town for a coffee. You swing the door open, already preparing your card for a contactless payment. You perk your head up and see your friends gathered round a table across the room laughing amongst themselves. Why weren't you invited?

In the days before social media, before everyone carried around an incredibly powerful computer in their pocket, these things would never have been a problem. Imagine a world where you are not always available, any time, any where. To be reached, you have a rotary phone hung on the wall in the hall way. To reach others, you have a small black notebook with names and numbers. To make arrangements, you need to actually pick up the phone and rotate the numbers in from your little black book. Even when the line starts to ring, there is no guarantee that the person you are calling will be in. So you simply assemble as many people as you can for the impromptu coffee stop you are planning and set off.

Imagine this had been the situation. You only own a rotary phone and have been out of the house all day running errands. You see your friends across the room in a coffee house, unsure if they had tried to reach you or not. Maybe this is just me, but I would grab a latte and join them at the table. Except in a world of Facebook Messenger, we tend to treat this as an insult to our lack of invite. So some of us would either sit far enough away and hope not to be seen, or simply leave for somewhere else. Call that what you want: insecurity, vanity, whatever you like. If the company you keep are those who care about you, will look out for you and support you; then approaching them, saying hi and asking to sit down shouldn't be an issue for anyone. Yet often times people don't do this. So if that sounds like you, I'd wager that either the company you keep isn't good for you, or maybe you are seeing things that simply aren't there. So if you ever find yourself in this situation, I encourage you to get out of your own head and just say hello. Whatever happens next is on the them.

~ Aedan.