Welcome to FoMO (Fear of Missing Out), the latest cultural disorder that is insidiously undermining our peace of mind. FoMO, a spawn of technological advancement and proliferating social information, is the feeling that we’re missing out on something more exciting, more important, or more interesting going on somewhere else. It is the unease of feeling that others are having a more rewarding experience and we are not a part of it. According to a recent study, 56 per cent of those who use social networks suffer this modern plague.
…Freedom from other people’s opinions and release from social comparison is a triumph reserved for very few. The self-discipline strong enough to withstand the power of FoMO is no less rare. In 2012, the University of Chicago social psychologist Wilhelm Hofmann studied the use of willpower to resist daily temptation: his participants found it far easier to abstain from food and sex through willpower alone than to stay away from online networks, where the failure rate was 42 per cent.
I am here to preach the saving grace of moderate misanthropy. When you realize that most of what you read online is superfluous garbage, and that most people aren’t worth the time it takes to get to know them, this onerous burden will dissipate into nothingness like so many instantly-regretted and quickly-deleted tweets. But perhaps you weren’t fortunate enough to be born with a natural resistance to the company of others. In that case, I would recommend maximum indulgence. The only way out is straight on through the other side. Go ahead, join all the trendy social networking platforms, try to sample every empty-calorie viral story, try to be au courant with every lulzy meme. Be like a kid trying to scarf his entire bag of Halloween candy in one sitting. As you later kneel, retching into the toilet, just think of your discomfort and regret as weakness leaving the body.
May 29, 2014 @ 2:58 pm
Humans are just another kind of animal. Wouldn't it be better to cultivate an attitude that allows one to find their behavior edifying and entertaining rather than merely tiresome?
May 29, 2014 @ 8:34 pm
Pish. Damian may, just may, be guilty of the crimes of which he complains. 🙂 Misanthropy is yet another way of…signalling????
LOL. Just poking you, Damian.
May 29, 2014 @ 9:30 pm
Wouldn't it be better to cultivate an attitude that allows one to find their behavior edifying and entertaining rather than merely tiresome?
Yes. But allow me to explain the mechanics of a post like this one.
I read the linked article. As I read passages like the ones I excerpted, I am, for a split-second, struck by how strange it sounds to me that anyone should worry about this "fear of missing out". Just as quickly, I realize that this is most likely due to my solitary, aloof nature. Inspiration strikes, and I decide to express this otherwise-banal sentiment in quasi-Nietzschean prose, like I'm Zarathustra 2.0 coming to redeem the world, the pompous thought of which tickles my meta, self-referential, ironic funny bone. To cap it off, and to complete the circle of self-referentiality, I realize I know the perfect song to use in relation to the topic by some obscure grunge-era band from North Carolina, which provides me with a title for the post and a YouTube video as a bonus.
Point being, much of what you read here — probably far more than you even realize — is merely an extended exercise in constructing elaborate inside jokes for my own amusement. I hope that doesn't diminish the experience for you.
May 30, 2014 @ 3:08 am
Nah. We like your sense of humor.
Luckily, I am too old and too strange to worry any more about "missing out" anyway! 🙂
May 30, 2014 @ 10:56 am
You know, joking or not, you actually raise a fair and interesting point — anything I write in this space, knowing that other people will see it, can never be completely free of any desire to project a certain image, even if only for entertainment purposes. The only way to be absolutely pure in my motivation would be to make the blog private so that no one but myself could read it. So perhaps "honesty is my only excuse" — as long as I'm only shaping my presentation for laughs, not to be accepted by anybody's clique, maybe that's okay. I've always been consistent in saying that I don't want a lot of attention, and that if I somehow got it, I'd change my pen name and start a new blog to return to my beloved obscurity. Maybe that's the best I can do.
So it's interesting to think about, actually. My perception is that extolling the "saving grace of moderate misanthropy" in quasi-Nietzschean prose is too offbeat to risk signaling to anyone else, "Hey, guys, look at me, aren't I cool? Give me some attention. Let me join your club." If I began to perceive an atmosphere in which that sort of writing became cool and clickworthy, though, what would I do? I'd like to think I'd try to find a new, uncool way to express quirky and offbeat thoughts, but I guess I can't know for sure unless it ever happens. Food for thought.
May 30, 2014 @ 1:39 pm
Now, to get back into character. *Ahem*
I bring the Good News, only to be greeted with heresy from Doubting Thomases. Truly, let it be said that a prophet is without honor on his own blog.
May 30, 2014 @ 9:03 pm
Oh, but I, too, am all about bringing the good news to those of us who hang around the edges of crowds:
On soft gray mornings widows cry
The wise men share a joke;
I run to grasp divining signs
To satisfy the hoax.
The yellow jester does not play
But gentle pulls the strings
And smiles as the puppets dance
In the court of the crimson king.
May 30, 2014 @ 10:17 pm
Okay, back to content: What if someone said, "Most dogs aren't worth the time it takes it gets to know them."?
May 31, 2014 @ 12:02 am
While grammatically correct, the sentence is semantically incoherent. "A meaningful experience of what it is to 'know' the millions? billions? of dogs on Earth in enough depth to accurately judge their overall worth" is not something that can meaningfully be said to exist, thus the sentence lacks a referent and amounts to little more than literal nonsense. Informally, though, it may be understood as simply another way of saying "I don't like dogs," or even a linguistic rendering of a "yuck" face, a mere sentiment which refers to nothing but itself and seeks to communicate nothing but an announcement of its existence.
But that's only to be expected from a cat person. Even among homo sapiens, they're pretty awful.
June 3, 2014 @ 12:08 am
Obtuse. But I'm hard headed so Ill add this:
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
― Socrates
June 3, 2014 @ 12:13 am
Obtuse?
June 3, 2014 @ 3:13 pm
"…most people aren't worth the time it takes to get to know them…"
Your words… become meaningless when I use them?
Dogs and people and cats and slugs just do what they feel like doing or what they've learned to do. Scorn should be augmented with humor and sympathy for best results.
June 3, 2014 @ 8:37 pm
Your words… become meaningless when I use them?
Sigh.
"You're killin' me, Smalls!"
Don't make me have to start using these.
June 4, 2014 @ 11:58 pm
You made me explain! You were being obtuse.
June 5, 2014 @ 1:14 am
No, see, I was acknowledging the validity of your perspective with a wink and a nod but then pretending, with the amusing, ironic twist at the end, that what you were saying was actually backing up my original statement rather than criticizing it (as if I really were obtuse!). See, it's funny because it's like I'm every other ideologue on the web — I can only see the flaws in my own thinking when an opponent displays them too! Not that they're flaws in my case, because, as always with ideologues, It's Okay When We Do It.
Now, you've made me dissect a perfectly healthy specimen of a joke, which of course killed it in the process. I hope you're happy!
(I'm still mulling over the possibility of writing a new post to address the substance of your objection. We'll see if I can get it to take shape in the next couple days.)
June 5, 2014 @ 1:35 pm
Or maybe you were serious before and you're joking now.
I knew you were either joking or on crack; "obtuse" works either way, see. But a word or phrase repeated with a question mark universally means "explain" – I should have known that you were still joking, I guess. You wanna know a dirty little secret about joking? It's sometimes a sort of IQ test – a way of finding out if someone is really dense. People do this unconsciously, but if someone doesn't get the joke, it'll be noted. When lions roughhouse and find out that one of their own is weak, they sometimes turn serious and kill the weak one. Scary thought, huh?
June 6, 2014 @ 12:29 am
Feeling nervous, Noel? Don't worry. If it ever came to that, I would just have you and Brian duel to the death for my amusement. Perhaps a bicycling joust.
That was a question mark of amused disbelief — like, "Did he just call me obtuse? Did he think I was being serious? Bwahaha."
June 6, 2014 @ 11:53 pm
So you were either joking or on crack. Who knew? And don't worry about me I'm the one who knocks.
June 7, 2014 @ 12:43 am
No crack smoking for me, but last month, I got a 12-day course of prednisone for an autoimmune-related ear thingy, and let me tell you, I felt like GAWD ALMIGHTY. Talk about a fountain of fucking youth…