“We are a society dying of too much choice.”
This quote comes from a fictional character in a post-apocalyptic novel. 1 It could just as easily describe the actual state of our society today with its endless parade of personal options ranging from the mundane to the life-altering.
Not so long ago, most people’s life paths didn’t diverge far from that of their parents and grandparents. We grew up and grew old in the same town we were born in. We took on the same profession our parents did. We married whoever happened to be around, and we usually didn’t spend much time wondering about what our lives would have been like if we’d done any of it differently.
Thanks to the advent of the Industrial Revolution and all the technological advances ever since, we’ve been catapulted into a brave new world in which kindergarteners are now expected to at least have an idea of “what they want to be when they grow up,” while the rest of us are faced with even more profound questions, from where we want to live to where we want to go to school, to what we want our life’s legacy to be.
Isn’t more choice a good thing, though – as long as we’re at the controls?
Too Much of a Good Thing
As with most opposites in life, “oppression can exist at either end of the continuum.” 2 To put it in the words of psychology professor Barry Schwartz:
The “success” of modernity turns out to be bittersweet, and everywhere we look it appears that a significant contributing factor is the overabundance of choice. Having too many choices produces psychological distress, especially when combined with regret, concern about status, adaptation, social comparison, and perhaps most important, the desire to have the best of everything – to maximize. 3
What’s ironic is that Schwartz wrote those words prior to the debut of social media. With the advent of Facebook, Instagram, and similar platforms we’ve been introduced to a particularly debilitating type of overwhelm that’s since been dubbed, “Fear Of Missing Out,” or FOMO.
Most of us aren’t strangers to this phenomenon:
On a random given day, feeling more or less okay with how things are going, we stumble across a long-time acquaintance’s post on Facebook. We learn that they’ve taken a year off work and are currently traveling the world, and their inventory of eyewatering photos suggests that they are having the best time ever. A lot more fun than we’re having at the moment, anyway.
The thought then hits us with all the force of a hypersonic missile: “That’s what I should be doing, too! Or at least, I should be doing something other than this monotonous 9-5 I’m currently stuck with. I guess I’m behind in life.”
Because social media presents an array of life situations that are real and actual (at least to some extent), we take them seriously enough to question our own life choices. But because social media also does not give us the full context (Is our friend as happy as she looks?) it’s a rather poor guide for how to live our own lives.
Unfortunately, our brains do not naturally come equipped to navigate this kind of nuance. Instead, like short-circuited batteries they quickly become overheated and overwhelmed by competing messages and stimuli. Even if we know it’s not possible to do all the things, we can’t help but feel that we’re still not doing as much as we could.
To combat this treadmill of anxiety we need a new approach. In recent years, psychologists have coined a new term: JOMO, or “Joy of Missing Out.” Just as it suggests, JOMO takes an opposite approach and invites us to not care about the things we aren’t doing or experiencing. Instead, it invites us to think less about what others are doing (no matter how well) and to stop comparing their lives to ours.
A fair warning, though. JOMO does not come naturally.
We are social creatures and we get much of our sense of normalcy by eyeballing what others are doing. To some extent, this is perfectly normal. But if we are to have less anxiety and more joy in our lives, we need to look at life through a different lens.
Too Much Choice…Or Too Much Imagination?
To counteract FOMO and anxiety over our life trajectory, it’s helpful to consider how much actual choice we have in the first place.
To use the example of our world-traveling Facebook friend, our initial reaction is to think, “My life isn’t as cool as hers. I should do what she’s doing.” As though we can simply pack up, quit our job (or switch to a remote position), and start all over if we just “put our mind to it.”
This type of thinking burdens us with endless accountability: it’s all on us to have the best life possible, and if we don’t, it’s because we’re not trying hard enough or doing the right things. While a sense of agency and responsibility for one’s outcome is necessary in life, it becomes debilitating to expect ourselves to always be making the best decisions all the time – as if such a thing is even possible.
A much happier modus operandi is to make what feels like the best decision at the time, and then embrace whatever comes after that. Here’s a quick but powerful thought experiment: what if you had never logged onto Facebook that day and seen your friend’s post? Would you still be missing out on all those cool life experiences if you never thought about them in the first place?
“It also pays to remember just how complex life is and to realize how rare it is that any single decision, in and of itself, has the life-transforming power we sometimes think.”
Counterfactual thinking is one of the most powerful abilities we have as humans. It enables us to imagine things that aren’t yet real but could be: colonies in outer space, universal income, the cure for cancer. Much if not all of the progress we’ve made as a civilization over the last several thousand years is thanks to this ability. But it comes with a price.
Anytime we engage in counterfactual thinking, we leave the realm of reality and enter one of imagination and “what if.” This can be useful if it propels us to action, but it doesn’t take too many “what ifs” to become paralyzed. Because there’s not enough time for all the “ifs” to become realities, imagining is helpful only up to a certain point.
So when you are struggling to decide where to live or work, or who to date or marry, it’s useful to remember that much of your prophesies, imaginings, and “what ifs” may turn out to be true, but then just as likely may turn out to be bunk.
In short, while we do have real choices in life to make, we must not let our imaginations paralyze us and make our choices even more complicated than they need to be.
Schwartz also wisely notes that “It also pays to remember just how complex life is and to realize how rare it is that any single decision, in and of itself, has the life-transforming power we sometimes think.” 4
Embrace Your Mortality
Behind each incident of FOMO lurks an even more ominous specter: death.
If we lived forever then there would be no need to feel anxious or rushed about making certain life decisions or “milestones” because there would be an endless supply of “laters.” Whether we want to admit it or not, much of our anxiety is rooted in the fact that we will die one day.
But the very fact our time on earth is so limited is all the more reason for us to care about fewer things and focus on less. When we surround ourselves with huge portfolios of other people’s lives and choices, it can give us the false sense that somehow most if not all of these things are possible to us, too – and that having more experiences and “doing more things” somehow equals greater life satisfaction.
Part of the joy of missing out is not only that we no longer care whether we get the same things that our friends and families get – it’s that we can feel joy on their behalf, forgetting ourselves in the process. As tempting as it is to think of ourselves all the time, it’s also exhausting.
Thinking about death more often also has the potential to help you become happier. The immediate, grounding perspective it gives you will help you figure out what matters and what doesn’t more quickly than almost anything else will. Realizing how short this life is can help us see the absurdity of trying to do too much and let go of most of those choices we never really had time for, anyway.
We can imagine all the things that might have been, and there is an undeniable melancholy in that. But the fact that we’re able to imagine at all is a sign of our remarkable humanity. If we can let that be enough, we will be better able to make peace with ourselves over not only the things we did with our lives but the things we didn’t.
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