FOMO

Beware the Other Attention Deficit Disorder

As you read this column, you may experience an urge to check your social media feed. Did anyone like your recent post? How come more people didn’t congratulate you on your life update? Did people find your meme funny?

You’re not alone. I just felt the urge to check my Facebook account. It is becoming common knowledge that social media use has led to harmful psychological consequences, including the amplification of a psychological phenomenon known as FOMO (“fear of missing out”).

While FOMO isn’t a logical fallacy in itself, it can lead to fallacious thinking, such as the bandwagon fallacy and the false urgency fallacy. On the former, a person decides to do something because others are doing it. On the latter, someone acts quickly on the false sense that they will miss out if they don’t. These psychological tendencies make thinking critically more difficult.

Many retailers rely on FOMO to boost sales. For example, they carry seasonal items earlier than expected and then pull them from shelves earlier than expected. This creates a sense of urgency in customers, making them more likely to buy on impulse. Most shoppers don’t need the items being pushed. Yet they buy them anyway.

Be Discerning

I recently read Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (2019), by Cal Newport. It’s as relevant now as when it was first published. Newport urges us to be discerning in adopting new technologies. Rather than defaulting to acceptance, we should first ask how the new app or device will improve our lives and whether the cost of adopting it is worth the improvement it promises to deliver. In response, I deleted most apps from my phone and started taking daily walks just to think and pray. My mind feels sharper, less fragmented, and more at peace. And the world didn’t end because I didn’t pick up my phone.

If the urge to pick up your phone feels irresistible, it’s not necessarily because you’re weak-willed. Social media companies capitalize on your data and attention, and they design their apps to draw you in and keep you scrolling. Since you are the product, they make more money by keeping you on your phones and apps longer. In so doing, they exploit the fact that we are social creatures who want to belong. They prey on our psychological vulnerability. The result is a generation that has lost the ability to focus and that lives more frenetic, fragmented lives.

Think a Second Time

How ought we then live? Instead of rushing to our phones to “stay connected,” we should try slowing down and having a genuine conversation with someone around us. To do this, we will likely need to put some restrictions on our phones, such as blocking certain apps or leaving the phone in a drawer after we get home from work. When the urge to pick up your phone hits you, stop, breathe, and ask yourself why you would be picking it up. Think about whether it’s a good use of your time to browse Instagram for an hour. Think about what you would miss right next to you if you were to spend your next moments on your phone.

Did you get through this article without the urge to check social media? If not, perhaps it’s time to rethink how you use your phone. The real risk of FOMO is not that something amazing could be happening online that we simply must know about. It’s that we may spend so much time on our devices, we miss out on the opportunities to engage in life as it is offered to us moment by moment, and we don’t truly live.