Strictly for the purposes of this column, I checked the Coldplay concert ticket price. It was eye-watering. The Rs 7,500 ticket price was multiplied 50 times on a reseller platform. Trust me, they are not having any trouble selling those out, either. And they are not alone. Apple performs the miraculous feat of launching near-identical products every year with pomp, and getting savvy and price-conscious Indian consumers to queue up to buy them. It’s a triumph of marketing. And as always, there is a psychological phenomenon at play. You have probably heard of it and experienced it. It's called FOMO.
What is FOMO?
FOMO is an abbreviation for fear of missing out. A more technical term for this phenomenon is loss aversion. Before we describe what it is, let us conduct a simple experiment. If you scroll social media for five minutes, I am willing to bet that you will see EVERYTHING. You will see pretty people, ugly people; people you like, people you hate; at least one company offering a home loan, at least one influencer telling you that renting is the best financial policy; a sports person doing something remarkable, a politician doing something reprehensible. It’s everything, it’s aspirational and you want most of what you see. In reality, it’s nothing.
FOMO refers to the general apprehension individuals feel when they ‘believe’ they are missing out on the rewarding experiences that others are enjoying. It leads to a feeling of inadequacy, envy and a loss of status, which drives people to try and over-participate in social events. Psychologically, it creates an illusion that others will get ahead of us, so we must do whatever is possible to catch up and keep up. FOMO is a feeling that is contained within an individual’s mind. It has no bearing on reality. The person is not actually falling behind, they only fear that they are.
While FOMO predates the internet by millenia, social media has worsened our FOMO Shutterstock
FOMO is why people trying to give up smoking end up walking along to the cha-cigarette evening adda and then end up saying, “Just one, to keep you all company.” It is the reason why people flock to, what I like to call, Instagram cafes and restaurants that have proliferated in every major city with the signature blend of good lighting, aesthetic colors palette, and questionable but overpriced food.
FOMO predates the internet by millennia — it originates from the innately human need to belong and fit in. But social media has certainly worsened our FOMO. You only need to consider our experiment above to understand why. Now, also consider how much time we are spending on social media daily — 147 minutes for an average person, according to a 2022 study. That is 828.5 hours a year. In other words, 9.54 per cent of a person’s total time in a year is spent on social media. Sleep and work are the only other human activities that are beating this number.
FOMO is not restricted to the individual. It has permeated into companies and intensified herd mentality (where everyone copies everyone else to avoid missing out). In large corporations, it makes insecure managers schedule meeting after meeting to appear as busy and productive as other managers. All it achieves is prevent people from actually doing what they are supposed to do.
FOMO in high performance
Whenever I work with an elite sports team, I ask the simple question: do you love to win or hate to lose. Most of the time, the answers are tilted 60-40 towards hating to lose. This tells us a lot about how high-performers work. When you put in a lot of hard work, build momentum and see progress, the last thing you want is to miss out on the fruits of your hard work. Taking a step back to evaluate is often seen as going backwards, reneging on the promise of constantly moving forward. But sportspersons sometimes have to stop for factors beyond their control. I remember an athlete ranting about missing a preparatory camp because of an “inconvenient personal obligation”. What obligation, I asked. “My sister’s wedding.”
FOMO is why athletes go into a negative spiral when they have even a minor injury, because they think that everyone else will leave them behind Shutterstock
FOMO is why athletes go into a negative spiral when they have even a minor injury, because they think that everyone else will leave them behind. It is also why a partner in a big firm constantly puts in long hours at the cost of everything else in their life because they are afraid of someone else getting ahead of them. It is why every viral trend works, from the ice-bucket challenge to the ‘demure’ trend. It is why people make rotis on FB live or post reels of them going on morning walks.
FOMO thrives on the illusion that if you miss out on something, you will be worse off. Just remind yourself that you only have 24 hours in a day. You have tastes and choices of your own. If you do whatever everyone else is doing, aren’t you eroding who you are?
Dr Sahen Gupta is a Kolkata-born, India- and UK-based psychologist who divides his time between mental health support and high-performance coaching. As the founder of Discovery Sport & Performance Lab, he works not only with Olympians and other top-level sportspersons, but also with CEOs and other professionals striving for excellence. Dr Gupta’s mission is to simplify complexities of the mind into actionable and simple ‘doables’ that allow individuals to be mentally fit.