Ever student feels FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out, every once in a while. But what exactly is it, and how can students deal with the feeling of being left out?
TRANSCRIPT:
RUBALCAVA: It’s 1:00 P.M and the warm Indio sun is shining as you swirl to the rhythm of the music. You’re surrounded by all of your best friends laughing and dancing, pausing every five minutes for a selfie. Suddenly, you’re front row as Kanye West walks out on stage to surprise a screaming audience. Then, all at once, the snapchat story ends. You aren’t at Coachella – all of your best friends are. As they post every minute of the best weekend of their lives, you can’t help but to feel left out.
RUBALCAVA: This feeling is called FOMO, which stands for “Fear of Missing Out.” It is a relatively new term, recently defined in 2013 in the Oxford Dictionary as the “anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may currently be happening elsewhere, often aroused by posts seen on a social media website”.
SHERMAN: Very generally, it is this anxiety that we feel when we know that our friends are doing something, that they are going to a party, that they are hanging out, that something is going on and we’re are not involved in that.
RUBALCAVA: That’s Lauren Sherman, a developmental psychology doctoral student at UCLA and a researcher at the Children’s Digital Media Center@LA. While earning her PhD, she has been studying how teenagers and emerging adults utilize digital technology and how it affects social development.
SHERMAN: The group that uses social media the most are college students and adolescents, especially older adolescents. And they are also the ones that are the first to use new tools. That “magnified emotional experience” is going to be heightened for college students and especially for high school students.
RUBALCAVA: The “magnified emotional experience” that Sherman refers to is the intense preoccupation and anxiety that results from feeling like everyone else is having more fun or doing something more exciting than you are. Chances are if you own a smartphone, you have probably experienced this type of anxiety before. This sense of being excluded grows alongside the increasing number of social media apps that promise to keep us in touch with friends, family, and followers in real-time. Candy Samareta, a third year Communication Studies student, finds that Instagram is where FOMO strikes her the most often.
SAMARETA: You see the posts that they put, whenever they go somewhere this weekend and you aren’t a part of it, you aren’t tagged in it, that’s definitely a part of it. I think particularly in instagram for me personally.
RUBALCAVA: Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter are all means of staying connected to the lives of others. While these social media sites allow us to share our everyday lives with our entire network, they conversely also allow us to see what everyone else is doing. However, while social media is a contemporary development, the phenomenon of FOMO is not. Sherman says that this is something that humans have been feeling for decades.
SHERMAN: I would say probably in some form it’s always existed. The idea of knowing that something is going on and either you weren’t invited, or you weren’t invited and can’t participate and people are having fun is not new.
RUBALCAVA: The feelings associated with being excluded are not new either.
SHERMAN: Jealousy is something that has always existed, or loneliness. These are all things that have existed but are maybe amplified now and I think that is a big theme with social media.
SAMARETA: Personally I get temporarily sad or jealous. But for me it’s really short. I think for other people it can definitely make them jealous and resentful.
RUBALCAVA: There is no limit to how often these negative emotions may spring up. Laura Jhavera, a third year studying World Cultures and French, reveals the frequency of her own experiences of FOMO.
JHAVERA: Yeah all the time. Actually last night, my flatmates were going to go to the Boiling Crab in westwood, and I kind of wanted to go but I couldn’t because I had a bunch of french reading to do, so I chose to stay at home, but like lowkey I wanted to go with them”.
RUBALCAVA: Sherman also believes that these feelings of exclusion take us back to the negative feelings we experienced during our teenage years.
SHERMAN: I think most people can think back to being in high school and think about how awful it felt when people hung out without you.
RUBALCAVA: Thanks to the social media, individuals can document their lives online faster than ever before. Consequently, the time it takes to learn that you are missing has shrunk. When Sherman was an undergraduate student, social media was restricted to the computer. She saw posts about parties after they were over, since people had to go home and physically upload the pictures.
SHERMAN: Now, if you post a picture on instagram, you might actually be currently engaging in that activity.
RUBALCAVA:Sherman feels that it has become a buzzword because of massive access to social media. According to the Pew Research Center, found that “fully 91% of smartphone owners ages 18-29 used social networking on their phone at least once” during the course of a sampling survey in 2014. To combat FOMO, action must be taken to suppress negative feelings.
SHERMAN: There will always be times where people feel jealous or feel lonely, even if you have very successful friendships or relationships, it’s not always going to be perfect. They key is to minimize unnecessary feelings.
RUBALCAVA: Samareta has her own plan.
SAMARETA: You go out and so something fun yourself. You don’t miss out the next time I think.
RUBALCAVA: Sherman suggests something that might be a little more difficult in this day and age.
SHERMAN: The obvious answer would be to spend less time on social media, but that is very tough to do, that’s easier said than done…There was a study that came out fairly recently that found that feelings of anxiety or lower well being are particularly associated with going on social media and using it passively. So, going online, seeing what people are doing, browzing, going on your newsfeed if you’re on Facebook, that makes people feel more depressed over time.
RUBALCAVA: Instead of going online passively, Sherman suggests actively contributing to social media and staying involved. Also, she believes that by remembering the truth behind what is posted online, we can keep FOMO at bay.
SHERMAN: Acknowledging that when we go online, when we see what other people post, we’re looking at the very best parts of their life. It’s very cultivated or curated. It’s one thing to sort of know that cognitively and it’s another thing to overcome that emotionally. You can sort of feel bad about it even though you know that other person might have tough times that they aren’t posting about.
RUBALCAVA: The key is to keep things in perspective and remember that people often post only what they want others to see. Since social media makes sharing the best part of our lives so easy, it is up to us to silence our inner FOMO on the chance that it does arise. For Daily Bruin Radio, this is Amanda Rubalcava.