Staying in, Missing out.
I’ve lived with a quiet case of FOMO for a little bit like…most of my life. Not the trendy, hashtag version — the kind that sits quietly in the background of a perfectly good evening and whispers, Are you sure this is where you should be? Oh…you have no idea how I loathe that little whisper.
I’m a performer by nature. I love lively rooms, laughter spilling over dinner tables, the feeling that something memorable is unfolding in real time. But I’m also an only child who “adulted” early, spending a lot of time around older people, listening and observing. I’m grateful for that upbringing — it gave me perspective and empathy, and taught me how to be very comfortable around adults — but somewhere in there I also developed the sense that life was always happening in multiple places at once, and I might not be in the right one.
For years I tried to solve that feeling by doing more — saying yes to more plans, more gatherings, more movement. If you’re everywhere, you can’t miss anything… or so the logic goes (except that’s not really how it works). A cocktail here, an hour over here, oops - missed that one because time ran away on me … and now I’m just feeling mad that I missed that party, that event, seeing that person. I’d just be left feeling … tired. Even worse - not present really. FOMO doesn’t actually care whether you’re happy where you are; it only cares that other possibilities exist. Even when you’ve made the right choice, it has a way of nudging your attention toward the imaginary rooms you didn’t choose.
Energetically, that’s a sucky way to live.
When the world shut down during COVID, I thought maybe I had been cured of it. With nowhere to go and nothing happening anywhere, the comparison engine finally went quiet. But when life started up again, I realized the feeling hadn’t disappeared — it had just been waiting patiently. The real work, it turns out, isn’t eliminating FOMO; it’s noticing it and not letting it drive the decision-making.
Hmmmmm.
Because underneath it is usually a much simpler fear: the fear of choosing incorrectly and getting it wrong. The truth is we are always missing something. Every yes closes the door on a hundred other options — that’s just the structure of living. That door might be closed, but that doesn’t mean we’ve stepped off the right path.
What I’m learning — slowly — is that the moments that count are the conversations you’re part of. The laughter in the room you chose. They are exactly the ones that were meant for you. The older I get, the more I feel there’s a kind of quiet wisdom guiding us, even in the small decisions about where we spend a Tuesday night. The person who’s company you’re in, the quiet evening you decided to keep — there’s something meaningful about those moments too. Maybe the deeper truth is that we aren’t missing the right life somewhere else.
Maybe, in ways we don’t always understand in the moment, we are exactly where we’re supposed to be.