Fear of missing out, millennials and mental health

NOT too long ago, a friend told me about how she would browse through her newsfeed online and  with an added twist of “why didn’t they invite me?”, glance through updates of friends, or even just acquaintances, who have gotten together to do something fun and immediately get disappointed that no one had involved her. It would feel so personal even though she knew it probably shouldn’t.

At other times, she would go all out, jokingly, dropping little hints that they could have invited her, and that at  some point if they stopped caring, she’d have her own fun without them too. I could just have dismissed this as a normal friend chitchat as we have all felt that familiar twinge of sadness, disquiet, restlessness or anxiety about not being present for some desirable events. But I couldn’t, because clearly, what she’s experiencing is  FOMO, which on a more serious, life-affecting scale, is hounding  young people, especially millennials across the world, and particularly in Nigeria. In fact, thousands, if not millions of teenagers and youths are walking around undiagnosed and unaware that they are suffering from a mental affliction and that it even has a name.

Reps move to criminalise late payments of workers’ salaries, pension

In 2013, the word “FOMO” was officially added to the Oxford Dictionary, an acronym which stands for the Fear of Missing Out and describes that anxious feeling that can arise when you feel there is a more exciting prospect that is happening elsewhere —and unfortunately, you’re neither there, nor experiencing it yourself. Sheva Rajaee, a psychotherapist specialising in anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder, explains FOMO as an experience of anxiety at the thought of not being included in an event, not being ‘in the know,’ and a sense of or fear of not living one’s best life.” Simply put, FOMO is the reason while we’re browsing social media and happen to come across photos from an event that we couldn’t attend, only to suddenly feel a pang of sadness, anger, or slight anxiety, stirring a jittery feeling inside us, that we sometimes find ourselves asking “why  am I not doing all those cool stuffs?”  In any case, it has to be stated that the instantaneous window that the social media provides into the lives of others has taken FOMO to an all-time high in recent times.

To be sure, there’s never a point in the past that people from all around the world were so easily connected at the touch of a finger; much more, they’re constantly able to post status updates and pictures of the latest and greatest news happening in their lives. “Look at all I am doing and how much fun I am having” is essentially the message we write when we post photo after photo onto social media as aptly captured in an entry by Shelby Harkness, a writer in Odyssey. It has almost become a competition to see who is winning at life. Sadly, FOMO leads to a compulsive desire to stay connected with other people’s lives online, thus we get addicted to various social media platforms to a degree where checking up on what others are doing or how they are reacting to our posts becomes all-important and all-consuming. Yet, researches all over the world have also repeatedly indicated that FOMO leads to extreme dissatisfaction and has a detrimental effect on our physical and mental health– mood swings, loneliness, feelings of inferiority, reduced self-esteem, extreme social anxiety, and increased levels of negativity and depression. It is, therefore, not surprising that the use of anti-depressants has risen sharply in recent years.

It is in the sense that we worry and wonder why our social and personal lives aren’t as robust as what we are being shown in the media and how exactly we can achieve that elusive balance of living a productive, covetable, and vigorous life, all while remaining sane. Furthermore, in relation to the economic challenges millennials face, such as decreasing career opportunities and financial stability, FOMO is very real and very hard to get rid of. For millennials, it is not just a cultural phenomenon, it’s an epidemic and with nearly a billion users accessing the media daily, the case has been made about the strong negative emotional consequences linked to the use of the social media. Particularly compelling is research published recently in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology which found that seeing everyone’s digital highlight reel can lead to depressive feelings. Besides, it’s hard not to develop this 21st-century form of anxiety when one glance at your smartphone reveals a thousand awesome things your friends, relatives and even enemies are doing, in which you are not involved. While the millennials have produced some incredibly intelligent people and amazing inventions, they’ve  also indulged in  a strain of high-stress, ubiquitous pressure leading to an epidemic of mental health challenges among the generation. This obviously calls for urgent concerted efforts and actions to confront the mental challenges facing this segment of our population.

And one powerful way to fight FOMO and other forms of mental challenges among the youths is to let them realise that life is not lived on the canvas or in pictures.  They need to be told that there is no glittering life outside of hard work, which makes such life not susceptible to the dizzying lights of ostentation and unending splendour. They must come to  recognise that the fabulous life they think they’re missing doesn’t in fact exist. The truth is that our media, including social media, only present an endless montage of momentary highs disguised as everyday activities. Evaluating other people’s real experience by their carefully curated onscreen images, therefore, is like trying to navigate with binoculars that show only mountain peaks. Put differently,  measuring the entirety of one’s life against this cherry-picked strand of another’s is a recipe for feeling inadequate which is a precursor to depression.  Hence,  it’s about time to look at the good things we take for granted in life and constantly be reminded that  the human experience depicted by the media is never the whole truth and often an outright lie as almost everyone seems to be cutting corners to look their best for the media!

Steven Furtick says it best: “Never compare your behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.” If we constantly keep this at the back of our mind,  we perhaps stand the chance to cage FOMO, and overtime, seize control of our mental well being.

• Yakubu is of the Department of Mass Communication, Kogi State University, Anyigba.