JAKOB'S JOURNAL

Right now, there’s nothing to ‘miss out on’.

There’s nothing happening.

The FOMO victims appear to have it even worse than they did before, though. What gives?

FOMO — for those who live under a rock, it means: “fear of missing out“, and it’s used in conversation as if it’s an illness. Here’s an example: “I decided not to go to Billy’s big party, and I wound up having FOMO all night. It sucked.”). Where does that insecurity come from? After all, even if we weren’t missing out on ‘that thing’, there’d be a trillion other things that we could’ve been doing, and we obviously can’t do them all.

This “fear of missing out” is how folks like to frame it, but that’s not the issue.

Right now, we are all at home, either alone or with family.
No events. No parties. No gatherings.
Just… us. At home. Tucked into the bed we’ve made for ourselves. — I hope you’ve been washing your sheets!

FOMO was never the problem.

The real fear is that what we ARE doing and what we DO have are precisely what we deserve.

Accusing “FOMO” of our anxiety is just avoiding the uglier truth. We’re jealous.

When we don’t like the life we’ve designed for ourselves (usually because we refuse to change it), any amount of perceived joy we witness elsewhere feels drastically more desirable than what we’ve got, here, in this shitty house.

Well, we built this house! Or worse, we just moved in blind; no fixes, no new paint, no remodel—we just moved in because it was ‘a home’, and we never had the courage to make it ‘our home’.

On the contrary, once we start taking steps toward the life we want, we realize that the fear, the FOMO, is just a mirage.

There never really has been anything important happening, elsewhere, has there? Even before the COVID Crisis.

It has always been about digging deeper, planting roots, lifting up our eyes, building a home, designing a life to be proud of. All of that can happen right where we are, right now, no matter what else is going on outside.

Go ahead, Mt. Botl awaits.
Take that first step.