12 ms·

The Joy of Missing Out

231 points by jqcoffey 8y ago

hartator 8y ago
Hum, I don’t think the FOMO is linked to Internet usage, but real life things. We do social media to kill time, not because we FOMO.
- CharlesW 8y ago
  > I don’t think the FOMO is linked to Internet usage… Evidence suggests otherwise: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235285321730007X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235285321...
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    That still strikes me as highly silly. I mean people have always been afraid of missing out. From the tabloids, gossip, to the land-line era complaints about teenagers and phone bills. It is at most a slight exacerbator with the information flow in a similar way to group think and selection biases.
    - toasterlovin 8y ago
      It's the dose, not the substance, that make the poison. Because of the smartphone, social media is always with you, everywhere you go, and there is infinite content. That makes it pretty different from all the types of media that came before.
- mieseratte 8y ago
  > I don’t think the FOMO is linked to Internet usage, but real life things. Ignorance is bliss. If I don't know you are enjoying something, then I won't feel I am missing out on it. Since folks tend to post the highlights reel of their lives on social media, we see all the fun things and compare to our own and then feel a pang of envy or regret.
- pattisapu 8y ago
  Art imitates life or life imitates art . . . who knows . . .
agumonkey 8y ago
I extrapolate this to the need for slow transport.
- notadoc 8y ago
  Bring back the horse and carriage? Mule teams? We may have just stumbled upon the next big startup craze! Who needs scooters and self-driving cars when you can hop on a donkey that navigates slowly and entirely for you?
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    I was too short above. I see FOMO as the need for instantaneous satisfaction (abstract notion). Fast transport, as an obvious technological advance in the past, to guarantee time and space, removes us from surprise, unknown. When going to a town not far away was an adventure in itself, today going across the globe is nearly yawn inducing.
    - notadoc 8y ago
      > When going to a town not far away was an adventure in itself, today going across the globe is nearly yawn inducing. Indeed there was novelty to even somewhat local travel, now it's routine and ingrained. And flying across the world is done in a day. Perhaps why so many are looking up at space, it's the next great adventure.
- btrettel 8y ago
  I do think that slower transportation helps. Cyclists tend to be more patient than drivers, based on my (biased) observations. As a transportation cyclist I don't really understand the mindset of many drivers. Their apparent need for instant transportation seems to override safety concerns, particularly the safety of others. Often drivers aren't much faster than I am, particularly given the number of stop lights on my commute. Many cyclists have pointed out the irony in how a dangerous driver who nearly runs over a cyclist often sits at the next stop light with the same cyclist stopped right behind them. My guess is that cyclists are more patient due to both selection effects (more patient people are more likely to become cyclists) and driving actively decreasing patience.
BadassFractal 8y ago
I've regained a lot of mental peace once I quit Instagram. When you have hundreds of friends and follow random influencers, you get the impression that every single person is always on a beach in Bali, eating at Michelin star restaurants, riding Lambos and partying with attractive, successful people in the most exclusive venues in exotic locations. In the meanwhile you're a corporate drone stuck in traffic to get to your grey cubicle, dealing with a shitty boss, trying to figure out how to pay rent. The reality is that those people who FOMO you, don't have that lifestyle. They're simply marketers, but our brains aren't super good at seeing past that. And your friends? Sure, they go to a cool place once in a while individually, but you're just being exposed to hundreds of them all signaling at the same time. Statistically speaking you WILL see your extended social circle doing something cool multiple times a day. This used to be manageable in the 150 person village age. Bob got a new goat, son of a bitch.. oh well. But at social media scale our brains simply can't handle it. It's analogous to how regular people don't realize just how much Photoshop and photographic skill goes into making someone look as good as they do in magazines and on their IG feed. We look at them and immediately conclude that we're some kind of a sub-human degenerate species compared to them, whereas in reality it's all bullshit. It feels SO much better to swim in one's lane (basically JOMO), not looking around to see how everybody else is doing, especially when it's not real. I'm not a religious person, but there's something really powerful in the admonition not to covet your neighbor's spouse, house, animals... which is what I sense my brain doing on social media. The genius of IG is that it makes people willingly subscribe to hours of marketing every day. Zuckerberg got one hell of a deal on that company, 1 bil for it has to be the greatest deal of the century.
- skinnymuch 8y ago
  Booking.com acquisition by Priceline (though now the company is called Booking Holding) is probably the only deal this century that rivals Instagram.
  - NikolaeVarius 8y ago
    Not the company. Priceline Group is now Booking Holding, composed to Priceline.com, Booking, Agoda, Kayak etc etc
appleiigs 8y ago
I was in deep concentration today working on an assignment, but ironically Apple's Screen Time snapped me out of it. In all their wisdom to get me to use the iphone less, Screen Time notification popped up, bring me back. Edit: and can't turn it's notification off, it is not in the Notification settings area. I had to turn the Screen Time feature completely off so it doesn't happen again.
- Declanomous 8y ago
  At my last job they replaced the POTS telephone system that had been around for 30 years with a new POE touchscreen phone. The backlight never dimmed and it occasionally showed an animation. I wrote an angry ticket about it after about 2 days of having it, and 3 people from the IT department and 2 people from the company that sold us the phones showed up at my desk the next day, trying to figure out if there was something wrong with my phone, because "it shouldn't be that distracting." The only person who understood why I was pissed was the mid-level tech support guy from the phone company. I hated that phone so much I covered it in a sheet and only uncovered it if it was ringing. Similarly, the ringtones were all super obnoxious. When everyone had the same ring you could just tune out the ones that weren't coming from right beside you. The new phones had a huge speaker on the back and the ringtones demanded attention like a klaxon. It was maddening because the phone of someone 3 cubes behind you could get a call and it would be louder for you than it would be for them. Also, the touchscreen took 3 times longer to use than the old design did just because buttons are faster, you can use them without looking, and the UI was slow to begin with. I love using new technology, and I wanted a new phone because the old one was huge and took up a ton of my desk, but that phone had the worst UX. I just wanted a phone that did the same thing my old phone could do, maybe with better audio quality. I didn't want a phone that demanded my attention to do things.
  - chii 8y ago
    > I just wanted a phone that did the same thing my old phone could do This is what happens when the buyer (or cheque signer!) is not a user. To make a sale, the phone vendors has to bid or propose, and for them to stand out, phone needs features. Whether those features make sense or not probably matters less than whether they "beat" the competitors' feature list. I wonder if there's a way to delegate to the actual users of tools and equipment, the responsibility of evaluating said tool?
wallflower 8y ago
"I'm the type who'd like to sit home and watch every party that I'm invited to on a monitor in my bedroom." -Andy Warhol
foobarbecue 8y ago
I idly went to Hacker News, scanned through this article, got to the part about doing things with intention rather than just floating along... which made me realize I was wasting time and so I closed the article. Except then I commented... ok to important things now.
- moretai 8y ago
  You are conditioned. Don't feel bad. Just be aware, and that awareness will hopefully prevent you from doing things you don't want to do in the future. Good Day.
rosstex 8y ago
>The moments that we’re spending on our computer checking email slowly accumulate to hours and days, time we’re not spending living our lives. Well, if I didn't freak the out when I read this sentence. Time to do some journaling and go to sleep.
- skrebbel 8y ago
  But first quickly write a Hacker News comment!
fabatka 8y ago
I'm a bit confused by the CEO of Google preaching for spending less time staring at your screen. Doesn't their company's value depend strongly on this metric? My guess would be that its only for show, but shouldn't the shareholders be angry about a move like this?
- simongray 8y ago
  I would classify it under Corporate Social Responsibility. Any shareholders who would get angry at such a thing must suffer from serious short-termism.
- jonhendry18 8y ago
  Maybe ads are slightly more effective if you spend less time on the screen. Less ad-blindness, etc.
mattlondon 8y ago
> Know that you likely have a problem. > Do you own a smartphone? > That's it. I disagree. I think a better question might be "Do you own a smartphone and use social media?" A lot of the comments I see around this - especially on the comments here on this page - is around feeds from Instagram and Facebook and the like. Yep - groomed social media posts are an unrealistic view of society. Just like movies and magazines are an unrealistic view of society too. "Man, everyone else is running around blowing up cars and shooting bad guys, but I am just a loser sitting here in the movie theatre." I guess people need to get a literal reality check. Personally I just turn notifications from email off (and I dont use social media), and have the Do Not Disturb feature in Android on so that only calls & messages from starred contacts (wife etc) makes a noise. Zero issues about feeling like I am being disturbed by my phone. I dont think I am in denial about this...
- princekolt 8y ago
  > and use social media? I'd argue it is not that straight cut. Just like you can tune do not disturb to allow important people to reach you, most social media sites allow fine tuning of notifications (except facebook, they don't give a shit[1]). For example, I use twitter to interact with other developers from around the world, and after configuring twitter to only notify me about interactions with people I follow, I'm never bothered by notifications from it either. [1]: Perfectly satirised by The Onion: https://www.theonion.com/new-facebook-notifications-alert-users-when-they-not-cu-1819577354 https://www.theonion.com/new-facebook-notifications-alert-us...
  - ehsankia 8y ago
    You have a problem if, multiple times per day, you open the feed and just scroll through not looking for anything in particular. As you mention, it seems like your workflow is very action oriented. You use it to communicate with people. But if you ever find yourself just scrolling through the feed for more than 10-15m per day, then you probably have a problem.
- dmortin 8y ago
  That's right. The phone is only a tool and it's only up to you how much you let it intefere with your life. Though, I guess for some the issue is willpower. E.g. if they use Facebook then they can't stop checking it.
gasull 8y ago
The Internet used to be something you had to reach out to, with a dial-up connection, in order to connect to it. Now the Internet is in our pockets, follows us everywhere and nags us with nonstopping alerts. Alerts is what creates addiction. They are rewarding/interesting only sometimes, like a slot machine. Just disable most or all alerts. Every time you get an alert, consider if you want a similar alert in the future. If the answer is no, disable it.
- cgs 8y ago
  This is really easy to do now on Android. Just long press the notification and you can just flip the notification toggle. The real problem though is people passively accepting their phones defaults. Users need to be educated somehow that it's in their best interest to actively curate their notifications, or better yet, put the onus on Apple/Google. What if the default for the first run of an app was to prompt you if you want notifications or not? That would certainly get rid of some cruft.
sridca 8y ago
I wrote SlowNews[1] in part to deal with the continuous influx of (addictive) content. [1] https://github.com/srid/slownews https://github.com/srid/slownews
scotty79 8y ago
I enjoy good blackout. Especially in the late evening/early night. Lighting up candles. Looking out of the window at people doing the same. Having only limited battery life that I should probably not use up anyways and having absolutely nothing to do.
technobabble 8y ago
It's amazing how tightly our brains can hold onto other peoples' expectations for you. For the longest time, I couldn't get over my ex. Last time I blocked her out of my life, she was doing these cool internships and immediatly had a "bounce back" relationship and people cheering her career on. Years after blocking her out of all forms of communication, and my brain still concocts this idealized, super-successful version of her that I had to triumph over like some twisted video game.

231 points by jqcoffey 8y ago

Hum, I don’t think the FOMO is linked to Internet usage, but real life things. We do social media to kill time, not because we FOMO.

CharlesW 8y ago
> I don’t think the FOMO is linked to Internet usage… Evidence suggests otherwise: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235285321730007X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235285321...
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  That still strikes me as highly silly. I mean people have always been afraid of missing out. From the tabloids, gossip, to the land-line era complaints about teenagers and phone bills. It is at most a slight exacerbator with the information flow in a similar way to group think and selection biases.
  - toasterlovin 8y ago
    It's the dose, not the substance, that make the poison. Because of the smartphone, social media is always with you, everywhere you go, and there is infinite content. That makes it pretty different from all the types of media that came before.
mieseratte 8y ago
> I don’t think the FOMO is linked to Internet usage, but real life things. Ignorance is bliss. If I don't know you are enjoying something, then I won't feel I am missing out on it. Since folks tend to post the highlights reel of their lives on social media, we see all the fun things and compare to our own and then feel a pang of envy or regret.
pattisapu 8y ago
Art imitates life or life imitates art . . . who knows . . .

agumonkey 8y ago

I extrapolate this to the need for slow transport.

notadoc 8y ago
Bring back the horse and carriage? Mule teams? We may have just stumbled upon the next big startup craze! Who needs scooters and self-driving cars when you can hop on a donkey that navigates slowly and entirely for you?
- agumonkey 8y ago
  I was too short above. I see FOMO as the need for instantaneous satisfaction (abstract notion). Fast transport, as an obvious technological advance in the past, to guarantee time and space, removes us from surprise, unknown. When going to a town not far away was an adventure in itself, today going across the globe is nearly yawn inducing.
  - notadoc 8y ago
    > When going to a town not far away was an adventure in itself, today going across the globe is nearly yawn inducing. Indeed there was novelty to even somewhat local travel, now it's routine and ingrained. And flying across the world is done in a day. Perhaps why so many are looking up at space, it's the next great adventure.
btrettel 8y ago
I do think that slower transportation helps. Cyclists tend to be more patient than drivers, based on my (biased) observations. As a transportation cyclist I don't really understand the mindset of many drivers. Their apparent need for instant transportation seems to override safety concerns, particularly the safety of others. Often drivers aren't much faster than I am, particularly given the number of stop lights on my commute. Many cyclists have pointed out the irony in how a dangerous driver who nearly runs over a cyclist often sits at the next stop light with the same cyclist stopped right behind them. My guess is that cyclists are more patient due to both selection effects (more patient people are more likely to become cyclists) and driving actively decreasing patience.

BadassFractal 8y ago

I've regained a lot of mental peace once I quit Instagram. When you have hundreds of friends and follow random influencers, you get the impression that every single person is always on a beach in Bali, eating at Michelin star restaurants, riding Lambos and partying with attractive, successful people in the most exclusive venues in exotic locations. In the meanwhile you're a corporate drone stuck in traffic to get to your grey cubicle, dealing with a shitty boss, trying to figure out how to pay rent. The reality is that those people who FOMO you, don't have that lifestyle. They're simply marketers, but our brains aren't super good at seeing past that. And your friends? Sure, they go to a cool place once in a while individually, but you're just being exposed to hundreds of them all signaling at the same time. Statistically speaking you WILL see your extended social circle doing something cool multiple times a day. This used to be manageable in the 150 person village age. Bob got a new goat, son of a bitch.. oh well. But at social media scale our brains simply can't handle it. It's analogous to how regular people don't realize just how much Photoshop and photographic skill goes into making someone look as good as they do in magazines and on their IG feed. We look at them and immediately conclude that we're some kind of a sub-human degenerate species compared to them, whereas in reality it's all bullshit. It feels SO much better to swim in one's lane (basically JOMO), not looking around to see how everybody else is doing, especially when it's not real. I'm not a religious person, but there's something really powerful in the admonition not to covet your neighbor's spouse, house, animals... which is what I sense my brain doing on social media. The genius of IG is that it makes people willingly subscribe to hours of marketing every day. Zuckerberg got one hell of a deal on that company, 1 bil for it has to be the greatest deal of the century.

skinnymuch 8y ago
Booking.com acquisition by Priceline (though now the company is called Booking Holding) is probably the only deal this century that rivals Instagram.
- NikolaeVarius 8y ago
  Not the company. Priceline Group is now Booking Holding, composed to Priceline.com, Booking, Agoda, Kayak etc etc

appleiigs 8y ago

I was in deep concentration today working on an assignment, but ironically Apple's Screen Time snapped me out of it. In all their wisdom to get me to use the iphone less, Screen Time notification popped up, bring me back. Edit: and can't turn it's notification off, it is not in the Notification settings area. I had to turn the Screen Time feature completely off so it doesn't happen again.

Declanomous 8y ago
At my last job they replaced the POTS telephone system that had been around for 30 years with a new POE touchscreen phone. The backlight never dimmed and it occasionally showed an animation. I wrote an angry ticket about it after about 2 days of having it, and 3 people from the IT department and 2 people from the company that sold us the phones showed up at my desk the next day, trying to figure out if there was something wrong with my phone, because "it shouldn't be that distracting." The only person who understood why I was pissed was the mid-level tech support guy from the phone company. I hated that phone so much I covered it in a sheet and only uncovered it if it was ringing. Similarly, the ringtones were all super obnoxious. When everyone had the same ring you could just tune out the ones that weren't coming from right beside you. The new phones had a huge speaker on the back and the ringtones demanded attention like a klaxon. It was maddening because the phone of someone 3 cubes behind you could get a call and it would be louder for you than it would be for them. Also, the touchscreen took 3 times longer to use than the old design did just because buttons are faster, you can use them without looking, and the UI was slow to begin with. I love using new technology, and I wanted a new phone because the old one was huge and took up a ton of my desk, but that phone had the worst UX. I just wanted a phone that did the same thing my old phone could do, maybe with better audio quality. I didn't want a phone that demanded my attention to do things.
- chii 8y ago
  > I just wanted a phone that did the same thing my old phone could do This is what happens when the buyer (or cheque signer!) is not a user. To make a sale, the phone vendors has to bid or propose, and for them to stand out, phone needs features. Whether those features make sense or not probably matters less than whether they "beat" the competitors' feature list. I wonder if there's a way to delegate to the actual users of tools and equipment, the responsibility of evaluating said tool?

wallflower 8y ago

"I'm the type who'd like to sit home and watch every party that I'm invited to on a monitor in my bedroom." -Andy Warhol

foobarbecue 8y ago

I idly went to Hacker News, scanned through this article, got to the part about doing things with intention rather than just floating along... which made me realize I was wasting time and so I closed the article. Except then I commented... ok to important things now.

moretai 8y ago
You are conditioned. Don't feel bad. Just be aware, and that awareness will hopefully prevent you from doing things you don't want to do in the future. Good Day.

rosstex 8y ago

>The moments that we’re spending on our computer checking email slowly accumulate to hours and days, time we’re not spending living our lives. Well, if I didn't freak the out when I read this sentence. Time to do some journaling and go to sleep.

skrebbel 8y ago
But first quickly write a Hacker News comment!

fabatka 8y ago

I'm a bit confused by the CEO of Google preaching for spending less time staring at your screen. Doesn't their company's value depend strongly on this metric? My guess would be that its only for show, but shouldn't the shareholders be angry about a move like this?

simongray 8y ago
I would classify it under Corporate Social Responsibility. Any shareholders who would get angry at such a thing must suffer from serious short-termism.
jonhendry18 8y ago
Maybe ads are slightly more effective if you spend less time on the screen. Less ad-blindness, etc.

mattlondon 8y ago

> Know that you likely have a problem. > Do you own a smartphone? > That's it. I disagree. I think a better question might be "Do you own a smartphone and use social media?" A lot of the comments I see around this - especially on the comments here on this page - is around feeds from Instagram and Facebook and the like. Yep - groomed social media posts are an unrealistic view of society. Just like movies and magazines are an unrealistic view of society too. "Man, everyone else is running around blowing up cars and shooting bad guys, but I am just a loser sitting here in the movie theatre." I guess people need to get a literal reality check. Personally I just turn notifications from email off (and I dont use social media), and have the Do Not Disturb feature in Android on so that only calls & messages from starred contacts (wife etc) makes a noise. Zero issues about feeling like I am being disturbed by my phone. I dont think I am in denial about this...

princekolt 8y ago
> and use social media? I'd argue it is not that straight cut. Just like you can tune do not disturb to allow important people to reach you, most social media sites allow fine tuning of notifications (except facebook, they don't give a shit[1]). For example, I use twitter to interact with other developers from around the world, and after configuring twitter to only notify me about interactions with people I follow, I'm never bothered by notifications from it either. [1]: Perfectly satirised by The Onion: https://www.theonion.com/new-facebook-notifications-alert-users-when-they-not-cu-1819577354 https://www.theonion.com/new-facebook-notifications-alert-us...
- ehsankia 8y ago
  You have a problem if, multiple times per day, you open the feed and just scroll through not looking for anything in particular. As you mention, it seems like your workflow is very action oriented. You use it to communicate with people. But if you ever find yourself just scrolling through the feed for more than 10-15m per day, then you probably have a problem.
dmortin 8y ago
That's right. The phone is only a tool and it's only up to you how much you let it intefere with your life. Though, I guess for some the issue is willpower. E.g. if they use Facebook then they can't stop checking it.

gasull 8y ago

The Internet used to be something you had to reach out to, with a dial-up connection, in order to connect to it. Now the Internet is in our pockets, follows us everywhere and nags us with nonstopping alerts. Alerts is what creates addiction. They are rewarding/interesting only sometimes, like a slot machine. Just disable most or all alerts. Every time you get an alert, consider if you want a similar alert in the future. If the answer is no, disable it.

cgs 8y ago
This is really easy to do now on Android. Just long press the notification and you can just flip the notification toggle. The real problem though is people passively accepting their phones defaults. Users need to be educated somehow that it's in their best interest to actively curate their notifications, or better yet, put the onus on Apple/Google. What if the default for the first run of an app was to prompt you if you want notifications or not? That would certainly get rid of some cruft.

sridca 8y ago

I wrote SlowNews[1] in part to deal with the continuous influx of (addictive) content. [1] https://github.com/srid/slownews https://github.com/srid/slownews

scotty79 8y ago

I enjoy good blackout. Especially in the late evening/early night. Lighting up candles. Looking out of the window at people doing the same. Having only limited battery life that I should probably not use up anyways and having absolutely nothing to do.

technobabble 8y ago

It's amazing how tightly our brains can hold onto other peoples' expectations for you. For the longest time, I couldn't get over my ex. Last time I blocked her out of my life, she was doing these cool internships and immediatly had a "bounce back" relationship and people cheering her career on. Years after blocking her out of all forms of communication, and my brain still concocts this idealized, super-successful version of her that I had to triumph over like some twisted video game.