FOMO: Our Relationship with Social Media

picture this you log into social media and you see this picture of some friends at a party scroll down and here's a video of a friend cliff diving in Cancun a number of friends are talking about garden cop and you haven't seen it yet and now you start feeling something called FOMO or fear of missing out FOMO is the anxiety we experience when we feel there's something exciting happening elsewhere and we're not a part of it it's been around for a long time but these days it's triggered mostly by posts on social media social media

gives us instant access to the activity of our friends that's what it's there for and this can be a good thing but it also makes it all too easy for us to compare our lives to theirs this can lead us to second-guessing our decisions and feeling insecure in general it can even get to the point when there's a looming sense of FOMO even when we're not online so how do we kick this FOMO an answer that might quickly spring to mind is to simply quit social media but that's not practical for a lot of people

instead of quitting you can try limiting your time on it or even just taking a few days off this can give you a chance to focus on what's important in your life and enjoy the things that you are doing without comparing them to others the lives of our friends do sometimes look pretty exciting online but let's put some quotation marks around the word lives there social media activity isn't their actual life per se it's more of a highlight reel of exciting things they've posted to contribute to their online identity it's easy to see these highlights

and think my life just isn't as exciting as theirs but what we're usually not seeing is what's going on behind the scenes the negative things or the boring routine of their day-to-day lives they may post something awesome but in the grand scheme of things it's just a short snippet of their day the odds are when they're not out doing these awesome things they probably experience just as much FOMO as you do GCF global creating opportunities for a better life