Mac, Zen and the Art of FOMO
Sarah Jons 
Now, you may argue that FOMO is healthy motivation. But the first of FOMO's four words is fear, which is the opposite of healthy.
Now, you may argue that FOMO is healthy motivation. But the first of FOMO's four words is fear, which is the opposite of healthy. Fear can get us moving, but never happily. Living with constant or recurring fear, from post-traumatic stress to paranoia to FOMO, doesn't improve life quality; it just makes us haunted and tense, and shrivels our internal organs. So our task is to live in a FOMO plagued world without catching the virus.
A powerful way to fight FOMO is to recognise that the fabulous life you think you're missing doesn't in fact exist. Our media, including social media, present an endless montage of momentary highs disguised as everyday activities. But evaluating other people's real experience by their carefully curated onscreen images is like trying to navigate with binoculars that show only mountain peaks. When you feel FOMO coming on, remind yourself that practically every image you see on any screen is likely to be misleading. Whether the images were created by individuals (smartphones, Tumblr, Facebook posts, blogs, e-mails) or by professionals (adverts, reality shows, Web sites), they tend to capture moments of artificial jollity. Professional photographers and advertisers earn their keep by goading people who feel sort of all right into appearing momentarily ecstatic.
If photographs are an illusion, words are creations of the human mind, but they also, to some extent, create it. Our feelings and behaviour are influenced by the words we use. For example, in one study, people who unscrambled sentences containing words that evoke aging [like ancient, wrinkle, or retired] walked away more slowly than people who'd unscrambled age-neutral words.
But what if FOMO meant something else? What if we could inoculate ourselves against its toxic effects by associating it with other concepts entirely? For instance, it could just as easily stand for Fear of Moving On. With this definition, you remind yourself that fixating on things you may be missing is just another way of resisting your own life, your own unfolding destiny. Your symptoms abate and your FOMO is cured.
If anyone in history should have died from FOMO, it would be Emily Dickinson, an agoraphobic who virtually never left her house and almost certainly never owned a Apple Watch. Yet millions of people still read Dickinson's stunning descriptions of many mind-blowing experiences: To live, is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.
This very moment of your life, if you experience it fully, will show you astonishing wonders and exquisite delights. Simple presence will take you on adventures you could miss altogether in the pursuit of nonstop thrills, without the anxiety, exhaustion, and expense. So learn to disbelieve the media hype. Listen for the wiser, deeper inner voice that tells you to relax, to melt open, to stop. Once you try it, you won't believe what you've been missing.
FOMO is something that needs to be tackled alone. Group therapy just isn’t the answer. After all, we’d all be too worried about missing out on another, more exciting session elsewhere. On a deeper level, we know this. What we fear is missing out on our own lives by keeping our eyes glued to a tiny screen.
When you can successfully do this, you've unlocked a powerful tool called #JOMO.
That is the Joy Of Missing Out.
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