Annotations
What now makes your lack of ravioli particularly salient to you is not simply that you aren’t having it, but that others are going to be sharing in an experience that you are not. There is now a social implication beyond just what you will or will not enjoy eating.
Emotions that feel bad often serve important purposes. Anger can help us realise when things are unjust, regret can motivate us to make amends. If FOMO has a function like these other emotions, what is its role and how might it make our lives better?
There are three important features of FOMO to unpack. The first is that the object of our FOMO (the of in the ‘fear of missing out’) is some experience or thing that we imagine as being absent from our lives.
So, the second important element is how we evaluate the potential absence. And this is where the social analysis comes in. We evaluate the absence as negatively impacting our social life or social connections.
The third thing to consider about FOMO is whether we can we take our acronym at face value and understand FOMO as a genuine kind of fear. There is a seemingly good reason to think we cannot.
Philosophers, at least since Aristotle’s Rhetoric, understand fear in terms of danger. We are afraid of things that we perceive as harmful. Such harm, as Aristotle puts it, must be close at hand, terrible, and have the power to cause us great pain.
We call fears like these recalcitrant; they persist despite our knowledge that the object of our fear is not particularly dangerous. And nobody is denying that these still deserve to be branded as fears, albeit special ones.
Recalcitrant emotions pull us in two directions: we fear something, so we envisage danger, yet, at the same time, we know it isn’t dangerous. If our rational faculties were operating optimally, we wouldn’t exhibit this kind of inconsistency.
And the reason for this is that, unlike common house spiders, there is, in fact, a significant potential threat that FOMO directs our attention towards. As I have said, FOMO is characterised by our envisaging some absence as damaging to our social lives or social connections.
If we do go wrong in our feelings of FOMO sometimes, it is more likely due to our overestimation of the significance of something rather than due to some kind of inconsistency.