FOMO
This "fear of missing out" is fracturing our one and only real choice in a time-obsessed western mindset - our focus, or if you prefer, our attention. We can blame the company we work for, or the spouse we married, or the expectations we place on ourselves, but FOMO is driving us to waste our focus and attention on the insignificant and BSOs (bright shiny objects) in life. Usually they are in essence whatever makes the most noise, email, phone calls, information overload, project overclocking and expectations of never missing out on any single opportunity ever in our short lives.
I once was that kind of person. Now I am aiming toward, and sometimes succeeding, at being an essentialist, as Gregg McKeown describes it, the diligent pursuit of less but better. There are however a number of things that are undermining my success. While I personally am no longer caught in the mindless FOMO, almost everyone around me still is, and their FOMOs are urgently trying to feed mine, engage mine, overwhelm my resistance, overburden me with their FOMOs. This sabotage is amazingly constant and persistent. My daily clarity about . . . well, what I am about, has never needed more shoring up and defenses than now.
While I am not trying to convince anyone that FOMO is negative, I have merely come to the conclusion that it is negative for me. I cannot live all of the options that come my way, nor can I experience every possibility, nor can I even pursue most of them because many of them are in conflict with one another. As a friend told me this week, when listening to a breathtaking example of guitar virtuoso, that he would "give up parts of his manhood to have skill of that level" what he really said although he did not realize it, is that he is unwilling to commit to the endless hours of practice that this represents - the one desire is in conflict with his other desires. He cannot live the life of a guitar virtuoso, because he also wants so many other things . . . more than he wants to be a guitar virtuoso, irregardless of the claims to parceling out significant manly body parts.
FOMO is driving him crazy. I plainly told him that he could indeed be a virtuoso, and he immediately responded with the question "how". Oh about 10,000 hours of practice practice practice, I told him. Well that is not practical he responded, and he is totally correct. He can't live the life he has, AND the life of a virtuoso. Either or, yes, but both, no. And so he has made a choice, an unwilling unhappy choice from his point of view, a necessary and inescapable choice from my point of view. The only way to overcome the life of fractured focus and attention, is to realize that this is the only real currency I have to spend, and I need to spend it carefully, wisely and thoughtfully.
