Your friends invite you to a party yet you’ve already planned to go out with your sibling.
Your boss offered you a raise at work, yet you just got another job offer with a different firm.
You just got back from a great date, yet wonder whether it would be better to pursue them further or go back to other options.
Why is this a common experience we all feel?
Because we’re afraid. We all know it and feel it.
The Fear Of Missing Out.
It’s a totally normal feeling. Yet it has been popularized into something that we all have to feel, that’s terrible, and we just have to deal with it. And maybe that’s true sometimes for you. But have you ever really questioned why feel it?
FOMO results from the fact you have a thought that one option will be better than the other. Our brains love to be right. They want to guess the “right” thing for us to do. And so when the brain is given two options, it’s going to grind things out with pro/con lists for days. And even when you’ve made a decision, your brain will still be buffering in the background, wondering if the other option would be better or pouting that it can’t do both.
Yet what happens when we feel FOMO? We don’t feel particularly good, we feel like we’ve made a mistake maybe, or just wish things would have worked out better. How is that going to affect your experience doing the thing you decided on?
It’s going to be poor. And you’re going to miss out on the full experience.
That’s the thing. No one wins with FOMO. You will miss out on one thing or the other. That’s just a fact. We can’t do everything. It’s not in our control.
What can we do? We can be confident in what we want and decide we were supposed to miss the other thing. You see, there’s really no right or wrong answer, just different paths available to take.
I choose to take the path where yes I miss out on some things and I want to. I recognize there is no “better” option, only what I make of it in the end because I determine if I have a good time or not, if I’m successful or not.
It’s not the things outside of you that will determine whether the party would have been more fun or if you should have cared more about your sibling? You just get to decide and own up to it. And with this ownership comes the power of actually enjoying the thing you choose and loving the life you live, without missing out on yourself.
