What I've learned by letting go of FOMO
If you've been reading the comments, you'll know of my beginning a cancer journey. For the uninitiated, the Reader's Digest version is that I have a neuroendocrine tumor on my pancreas. This is not the "I'll be dead in three months" type of cancer. It's very manageable, and at this time my surgical oncologist recommends monitoring and not surgery.
Needless to say, I went through many thoughts as I digested the news. I'm still not used to the fact that I can say "I have cancer." It's still surreal. I have no problem with disclosing that I have cancer. It's one way that I make it more real to myself, by speaking it into existence. As the old saw goes, you can't confront a problem unless you name it.
When I received the news, I knew that I'd have to make changes to my life. And I'm not speaking about physical changes. I'm speaking more about mental and spiritual changes. Those can be just as hard or harder than anything physical, like stopping doing things which might affect the course of the illness. With mental or spiritual changes, I have to look into myself and reorient my outlook and philosophy.
What I first decided was that I had to break myself of the social media habit, or at least not be on social media 24/7 as I had been. And it's hard, because social media conditions you to stay logged on, to keep scrolling, to keep commenting. We are social creatures, and receiving approbation online is more addictive than fentanyl. You will do anything for that endorphin hit, for that like, for the comments. Likewise, arguing with people you think not only wrong, but absolutely destructive also releases those endorphins, as you gird yourself for a battle, for a back and forth of insults and calumnies.
The conclusion I came to is this: If I did, in fact, have a more serious incidence of cancer—not to downplay what I do have—would I spend my free time arguing with strangers on the internet? Would I want to expend my energy in that way? And if not, why would I want to do that at all, regardless of severity? If such an expenditure would be silly with a much more serious illness, it remains silly in any other instance.
Social media has conditioned its users to anxiously look at the app or the website you miss out on something. This fear of missing out, this FOMO, is truly the hook that social media companies use to take you and keep you. That somehow it's incumbent upon you to be constantly jacked into the matrix and downloading all the petabytes of data that we generate. All the news, all the gossip, all the flotsam and jetsam of our postmodern reality. As a teenager I watched the short-lived TV series Max Headroom. In that dystopia, you were required to have your television on, all day and all night. (This is much like Nineteen Eighty-four.) What in the show was mandated by The Powers that Be, in our world we voluntarily do it to ourselves. For years the first thing I would do upon waking up was to go straight to Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, to see what I'd missed when I begrudgingly had to give into my bodily needs and sleep. I would wake up in the middle of the night and open up my phone to see if there was anyone I needed to block. The thought of missing something filled me with anxiety. However, the constant need to be jacked in always filled me with even greater anxiety.
We so mindlessly fill our days with the scroll of social media, getting so-called "information" from it. As we know, social media is rife with disinformation and outright lies; why we turn to it to keep up to date on events shows how addictive it is. FOMO is as much an addiction as any other, this constant craving to not miss anything. At some point, this becomes debilitating.
Being in the hospital for a week, then recovering at home for another week, while my body was healing from pancreatitis and pneumonia was in many ways a blessing. It was being hit with a 2 by 4 to my soul. It was an awakening: I don't need to be clued in every minute of the day. I can go days without checking on Bluesky to immerse myself in the latest outrage. My life doesn't revolve around anger.
Letting go of FOMO is liberating. Yes, I still keep up on the news. But I do that the old fashioned way. I read news articles, rather than getting screaming social media posts which exist only as clickbait for monetization. And the time I don't spend on social media I use to write, to read, to listen to music, to watch film or television. To feed my mind and my soul. What our always-on culture has robbed of us is incalculable. It has robbed us of peace. It has robbed us of the ability to be alone with our thoughts. It has robbed us of just being able to be. You don't need to have an opinion on everything. You don't need to scream into the void with everyone else screaming into the void. You can be whole and complete in yourself.
In everything, moderation. Abstinence, unless necessitated by health, will merely make you rebound. Social media is fine unless it takes over your life. Being informed is necessary, but not to the exclusion of everything else in your day. Treat things like social media as what they should be: tools, to be used and put down when done. Tools shouldn't dominate your life. We can either be masters of our technology, or be mastered by them. Literature and art are filled with works which detail what happens when we lose control of the things we make. It never turns out well.