JOMO

The ‘JOMO’ (the Joy Of Missing Out) movement has started. I have to admit I didn’t know much about the ‘FOMO’ (the Fear Of Missing Out) movement that it is trying to replace. FOMO has always been a thing among competitive people even before the internet. If you recall those pesky kids who used to eavesdrop on your private conversation then later gossip about it, or those who copied your homework just because you would do a better job (so why bother making an effort to do it themselves), that’s FOMO in action. Some sections of the human race have always been obsessed with the lives of others, not out of curiosity but out of a need to enrich their own lives. Now we have a name for it, thanks to the internet.

When doing things became so easy that we could do all things we desired by just sitting on the bed in our undies, we thought, “Woah!”

What were we missing out on all this time?

So the race began. Everyone wanted to experience as many things as possible in their ‘short’ life, and the internet seemed to be a window for it all. We chatted and posted and liked and commented. We expressed ourselves, and responded to other who expressed themselves. We made new friends online, and met them in real life. We met people in real life, and kept in touch with them online. It was a buzz. Where was this magic all our life? What kind of neanderthal experience did people have before the internet? It was humiliating to even think of it. Networks in our brain were firing a million times a second, and we as a species were experiencing intellectual orgasm together, something that was unheard of in any generation of human existence.

But I don’t know whether anyone ever thought that this huge global brain orgy would eventually come to an end. Because, how could an experience come to an end if we knew so little about the organ experiencing it? But it is coming to an end.

First it started with notification pop-ups for messages from friends. Then notifications for friend requests, then for posts on social networking ‘walls’. Then when we started ignoring them, notifications from publishers whom we follow when they post something. Then when we started ignoring that too, notifications for friend suggestions, then notifications for important life events such as birthdays, events organised by someone nearby, or friend-anniversary, and the list goes on. The tech companies did (and still does) everything to revive the sagging libido of FOMO. They are still in the illusion that FOMO works, and that people will keep coming back for more. I am afraid it doesn’t anymore, and just because the heart beats doesn’t mean the patient isn’t in a coma. FOMO is comatose, and that comatose state is called JOMO. The patient is loving it.

About 15 years ago, when I had just finished school and started my undergraduate degree, there was a blog website called ‘rediffiland’. It was a place where you signed up, and got a webpage for free. A portal into the world, for free, just like that, from your sitting room! Can you imagine that? It was not a page on a closed social network where to access it, you had to be signed up to it. It was more like a proper website like the ones that journalists used to write daily news, and it was open to the whole world, and anyone could find it anywhere in the world. It blew my mind. It was my first entry into the world of blogging. I deluded myself of course, thinking that I was a journalist, and wrote articles with as much seriousness as I wrote english essays during school exams. But people would read it, some would enjoy it even and comment on it. I would also read other people’s writing and comment. This was golden. I received small but significant validation that what I wrote was no gibberish. It was a small but growing community made up of ‘bloggers’ (although I still deluded myself by believing I follow journalistic integrity while writing my articles). I probably didn’t know back then that it was called blogging.

Rediffiland :(

Then facebook arrived. It was like I was cruising down a river, then suddenly dumped into the sea. There was no end in sight, no direction, if you called nobody heard, and it was so noisy that you could barely hear your own thoughts. At first it was exciting because of the vastness. Now I could ‘post’ my blogs to a wider audience. There was theoretically, more readership. The possibilities were limitless. This encouraged me to write more, hoping that more people would read until one day, I would write myself into a real journalist’s shoes. It really felt like something good was happening to me. Then for some unexplained reason, rediffiland shut down. Why?

What was going to happen to all my posts? They gave an option to download all of my posts and archive it. So I did. I found a new blogging website, ‘blogger’. Back then it was not owned by Google. But the death of rediffiland was like the first breakup, the heartbreak dampened my spirits. Before this, my writing was positive and upbeat. Now this weed called cynicism was creeping in. I wouldn’t say it was a totally negative transformation even though the pain lingered. It manifested in my richer use of humour, sublimating the feeling of pointlessness of all the things we do in life. What I probably didn’t realise back then was how dependent I was becoming on the internet to reach out to the outside world. Why? That’s another story for another day. But, this was the exact opposite of what I envisioned myself to be doing with my days and night.

I tried to re-post all my downloaded posts from rediffiland onto blogger, but to no avail. Begrudgingly, I had to start from zero posts and build up again. It was as if a very important bit of my life had been erased. Just like that. I shook it off, I forged ahead and kept writing. I would not stop. To be honest, it kept coming out, so I kept writing it down. It was decent stuff, at least I wanted to believe that. But it kept getting harder and harder to find readers. My introspective method, piecing together or breaking down things bit by bit, or finding the curiousness of life’s little things, wasn’t finding much audience in a world which was moving into cat videos and clickbait. I couldn’t quite figure it out.

I was essentially stuck in slow motion in a fast moving world. FOMO was making people impatient. Everything was required to be summarised in one line, said the new tech entrepreneurs now dictating our lives. Twitter was the main culprit. They were the trend setter to this end. The emphasis on making thoughts as concise as possible or perish trying, was not the kind of culture I had grown up in. Little did I know back then, what was behind this philosophy. Little did I know how shallow American culture really was, and now I am not surprised anymore. Dumbing down your writing to 140 characters was hardly representative of the myriad of complex emotions and feelings the human mind experiences with the world around it. But everything had to be black and white on social networks to get noticed. It was like the world was turning into one giant McDonald’s hamburger, and we had to just eat that because that’s what the teenage tech entrepreneurs running the show wanted. This was not great for those going through the rigors of educating themselves to be accepted into society. In the end we were finding ourselves stuck in the garbage disposal of 140 characters. It was disappointing. Inside we all knew, who needed the education? But we were far too invested into the system, to back out of it now. Sadly for us few sitting in classrooms attending boring lectures, all the Darwinian fitness we were being trained to develop was now going down the drain, and narcissism was becoming the new Darwinian trait to rise up in the world.

Anxiety. That was the feeling that most people had when they ‘missed out’ on an indefinite number of things online. Paranoia was the what followed. Was it worth it? I am not an especially strong or intelligent person, and I let myself get swayed with the tide ever so often. But I found it so difficult to keep up, even with decades of education and brain-training. I never quite understood how my contemporaries appeared to be normal in the same situation, while I felt like I was going to burst at any point. I think the secret sauce was to just skim it from the top and don’t dare look what’s underneath. I lived a relatively sheltered life most of my childhood, being protected by helicopter parents. I never really had many real friends growing up, I never got a chance to make strong connections with my contemporaries. Perhaps if I had, I would have understood how to skim from the top and become a social magnet like a lot of people I later came to know, instead of the lonely wolf that I am silently digging through the ice until it breaks under my feet and I drown, totally oblivious at how much fun there is just on the surface. But that was JOMO right, because I was experiencing the joy of missing out, or was I completely oblivious to that feeling too? Or maybe this needs a more intellectual discussion at a later date.

Is JOMO a good thing then? Most certainly. Missing out has never felt better. After years and years of being told to not miss out on opportunities in life or you might have to pay for it dearly, I can finally not get affected by the doings of the narcissistic, obsessive people who believe they have it all figured out.

Or perhaps the social network, and therefore FOMO is a rebellious act by our generation, a kind of defence mechanism to not have to think about the blatant injustices we have had to face because our parents thought it cool to be irresponsible when they were younger. Which is a rather a poignant conclusion to this essay. But, our generation is growing up fast, and within a few years we have figured out anxiety and paranoia, and embraced the joy of missing out. Perhaps all this appears to self-referential. But the social and political leaders that are coming out of it are truly the best things that have happened to human beings in this post-industrial age. The future however gloomy it appears now (thanks to those ‘baby-boomers’), I believe will be far brighter down the line.