I have long been a sufferer of FOMO, and I’m glad somebody
finally put a name to it.
The clever acronym – which stands for Fear Of Missing Out –
may have been around longer than this, but only in the past couple years have I
started noticing people mentioning it as a specific phenomenon that affects
people in a specific way. I’m sure social media is a big part of it. In a way,
each tour through your social media is a tour of things you are missing out on.
In my own life, I think of this specific example from when I
was in journalism school. It was just a one-year program at Columbia (yep, I
dropped that name), so everything was a bit more intense as the experience was
finite. The capper of this single year was a booze cruise in the harbor out by the
Statue of Liberty. Everyone dressed up and everything. Because the subway I was
on was having mechanical problems – and because, let’s be honest, I probably
didn’t leave my apartment as early as I should have – I nearly didn’t make it
on time, and started suffering an emotional breakdown right there on the subway.
I imagined all my other classmates departing for this magical evening and all
going home with new sexual partners and all the other things I imagined
happening that night, and me being stranded on shore, and it was more than I
could handle. (As it turned out, they compensated for late arrivals by leaving
at least 15 minutes later than the scheduled departure time – and as it turned
out, I did go home with someone that night, but that’s another story.)
Anyway, that experience and others in my life help explain
why I get so stressed out when I’m watching a movie that causes me to get
vicarious FOMO.
This happened most recently during Booksmart. In a way, the entire movie of Booksmart is about FOMO, as the lead characters realize they
missed some essential part of their high school experience only after it's
too late to do anything about it. But within that there is a more specific kind
of FOMO about a specific party happening that last night before graduation. The
two leads are monitoring videos posted to social media by people at that party,
and it looks great. Meanwhile, they are suffering through all sorts of
ridiculous delays, first getting taken to a party thrown (on a boat, like mine)
by a rich kid that nobody is attending, and then ending up at a dress-up murder
mystery party. They do finally get to the party they’re meaning to go to, and
thankfully for them, it’s still in full swing.
I’m not sure how these girls weather all their various delays
with equanimity. Me, I’d be losing it, like I did that night 20
years ago. And I’m sure I was kind of squirming there in the movie theater. WHY
are they not getting to this party and WHY is it not bothering them more? I’d
venture to say it took me out of it a bit. I couldn’t relate to the lack of a
reaction.
It's not the first time I’ve noticed this happening. In
fact, it seems to be a common occurrence in movies about parties to have the
characters take a long time to get there, meanwhile getting embroiled in all
these other shenanigans. I think of The
Night Before, the Seth Rogen movie from a couple years ago in which they’re
trying to get to some amazing Christmas Eve party in a secret location. If
memory serves, they have a half-dozen seemingly avoidable errands to complete
on the way, including a wild goose chase to get some drugs (which are not even
for them) as well as a Christmas Eve dinner at somebody’s mother’s house. I do
think there may have been a bit of stress and FOMO by the characters in that
movie, but not the kind I would experience in that situation.
However, the stress of FOMO does not always decrease my
appreciation of a film. FOMO is a major motivating factor for the characters in
one of my favorite films of the last decade, Spring Breakers. There was the opportunity for major stress on my
behalf in the first section of the movie, when our four main characters are
some of the last students on a ghost town of a campus that’s lost all its
students to spring break. They can’t join their classmates until they have a
little cash, which they get by robbing a restaurant. Once they do arrive in
party central, they seem not to have missed much. The rest of the movie is
about FOE, Fear of Ending, which is a lot more melancholy and with which I can
a lot more easily grapple.
I think the difference between those first two films and Spring Breakers is that the characters
in Spring Breakers are not getting
waylaid on ridiculous tangents. The tangible stressful aspect of FOMO for me is
being so close yet so far. If you’re broke, it’s not like you’re almost at the
party but not quite there – the situation is hopeless until you do something
about it. The characters do, and then they beat feet to Florida post haste.
What I really can’t stand is the continual delay of a gratification that is
almost within your grasp, but is ephemeral, so if you don’t grab it quickly it
will be gone. That’s present in both Booksmart
and The Night Before.
And now I must leave you due to the fear of missing out on
the other aspects of my day.
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