No FOMO, Bro
- Aidan J
- Feb 14, 2019
- 4 min read
Today is Valentine’s Day, the day where all single people feel isolated and all couples indulge each other. Couples buy tons of chocolates, invest in big stuffed teddy bears that are forgotten within a week, and cram restaurants, suggesting that everyone else should stay indoors. We, the single people, sit inside our homes and wonder what it would be like to have someone there for us, someone fulfilling the hole in our hearts. Everyone in a relationship feels complete, right?
FOMO sucks. FOMO, or the Fear Of Missing Out, is a subject of frequent debate in psychology that tries to explain our curiosity. Simply, we want to live the best life possible, and if someone else does something great, we want to do it, too. It’s a lot like envy, except that it can apply to asinine things as well. We might envy a couple who are acting like the dogs from the Lady and the Tramp, but we also might not want to miss out on the optimal way to play a video game, and so we look online for advice. (This is coming from a video that I’ve watched recently about what game to start with in the Fire Emblem series. The guy answered that there is no best way to start the series and you should just play it.)
Every motivation a human could have reduces to the fear of missing out. For instance, why do so many kids learn musical instruments when they’re young, especially in affluent areas of the world? Well, parents want to expose the kids to music at a young age so that they have the opportunity to become a musician if they so desire. It would be much more difficult to become the Piano Man if you were never a Piano Boy. The kid hates playing the instrument (usually), and so he avoids practices often. Why does he keep playing the instrument at all? If he enjoyed playing the instrument, then he would also be okay with practicing and would accept the necessary evil. And kids generally do what is easiest for them. As long as there is no parental abuse in the kid’s household, he continues because he bought his parent’s myth. He honestly believes that he is missing an opportunity if he stops going to lessons. This myth teaches the child to do things he doesn’t care about, for fear that he might miss out on a later opportunity.
For an example for adults, why do so many marriages end in divorce? Many politicians, philosophers, YouTube channels, and older family members like to point out divorce statistics as something wrong with modernity. According to the APA (https://www.apa.org/topics/divorce/), more than a third of all marriages in the US end in divorce. Using that previous link, a population census statistic, and a little rounding, that means more than 74,000,000 people in the United States divorce. Why is there such a crisis? Maybe times are truly getting worse, but if we analyze the situation with FOMO, and think about what it means to be married, I would even say it’s natural.
We understand our life by remembering our milestones, especially the “firsts.” Our first car is something special, first love stays with us for our whole lives, first house means you now have a physical claim on the world, first child means you are creating a new life out of nothing. In today’s society, all these “firsts” can occur before marriage. Marriage, then, is not a start of a new life with someone you love, but a concession of life, to hunker down, waiting for your death. A natural question is, what now? After I’m married, what do I do, continue working and raising my kids, maybe repair the house? What if I’m missing out on life, what if there is some solution to the empty feeling in my chest in travelling? Maybe, I care more about searching for a person to love than living with a person I love.
There are other explanations, but I don’t find them quite as interesting. Maybe parents would revoke a child’s privileges if they don’t go to piano lessons, and then use that time to get some rest, or . As far as the divorce statistic goes, I did bring up that cultural standards no longer necessitate firsts after marriages, e.g. you can have a kid before you marry. This reason is apart of my analysis using FOMO, but a conservative might say that it destroys the family structure, making the marriage ineffectual in keeping people together.
With these long thought experiments, I want to clarify that this fear can be unhealthy, and we must try to overcome it. I believe it is this FOMO that causes us singletons the most pain on Valentine’s Day, and so maybe we can realize that couples are not more happy than single people, which might alleviate some pain.
If you’re looking for what I did to find out the amount of divorced people, I:
took the amount of adults from https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/99-total-population-by-child-and-adult-populations#detailed/1/any/false/871,870,573,869,36,868,867,133,38,35/39,40,41/416,417 (2017 statistics say 252 million adults),
performed 252,000,000 * 90%, which rounded down to 226 million, because APA said more than 90% of adults got married by 50,
and multipled 226 million by 33% to get 74 million because APA also said that between 40-50% of people divorce, so 33% is a clean, accurate lowball.
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