The FOMO is so very real
Before you left for college, every adult in your life probably told you that these would be the best four years of your life. You arrived to USC bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to make the people who would end up being your sorority sisters or fraternity brothers for life, your new best friends, and your bridesmaids and best men. Once you fumbled your way through the first couple of weeks of meeting dozens of people every day, you (hopefully) emerged with a solid group or spread out scatter of friends. Everything, it seemed, had gone perfectly. But without a doubt you were soon faced with one of the most serious problems facing college students: Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO). Mindy Kaling sums it up pretty accurately in the title of her book.
It basically means that any time you try to do something productive, like your reading assignments or catching up on sleep, you are haunted by the fact that somewhere on campus your friends and peers are doing something fun that you’re therefore missing out on.
The stages of being haunted by FOMO are fairly distinct:
1. You feel bad that you’ve been procrastinating a lot lately, so you decide to designate an afternoon or evening to unadulterated productivity. Naturally, you make a big show of telling all of your friends that you can’t hang out because you have to get some work done.
2. . You sit down and read a few pages, but then your group text with all of your best friends starts to blow up. You take a quick break to see what’s going on and see that they’re going out to dinner, going to the row, or seeing a movie. Basically, they’re doing something that’s better than whatever you’re doing. You will them to stop.
3. You flip your phone over or put it out of reach so that it will stop distracting you, but you’re in too deep now. You can’t focus anymore because you’re thinking about the plans that are in motion. You force yourself to read a few more pages but let’s be honest, you can’t absorb any information at this point.
4. You stare at your book and try to convince yourself that staying home or in the library studying is the responsible choice. But what if your friends go out and have the best night of their lives? You will have missed it, and that’s simply not acceptable. You know the feeling…welcome to FOMO. You want your friends to have fun, but you want you to have fun, too.
You have two options here. (The second one is much more likely).
5. A) You decide to be studious and continue studying. Your friends will undoubtedly manage to go have a marvelous time without you. Get ready to endure Snapchat stories and Instagram posts and stories about the fun you missed. You can hardly bear to hear about all that you missed out on.
or B) You give up on the studying and join your friends. The FOMO was just too real.
If you go with A, it’s okay. You may feel like you missed out on the the most exciting and wonderful thing that has ever happened, but it’s college. There will be plenty more “best night ever”s.
If you chose B, don’t feel bad. The people who told you that these would be the best years of your life were right. It’s not the end of the world if you have to stay up a little later tomorrow night to make up for the reading you didn’t get to tonight. It was worth the experience with your friends, wasn’t it?