Your FOMO is killing you.
We are so afraid of missing out on something, do anything we can to avoid it.
We spend money we don’t have, and waste time that we shouldn’t waste, to discover the emptiness of the activity. Why do we do this?
This problem happened before social media. It happened when people looked at their neighbor or friend and said maybe what they are doing is more interesting than what I am doing.
It is not true. You don’t see the hidden cost and consequence of what your friend or neighbor is doing and that stress that you don’t have to deal with. There is a joy of missing out on experiences.
For example I once knew someone at church who bought nice cars for his family and they had nice clothes and looked very successful. One day he asked me to help him with a computer problem at his house, and when I was working on it I overheard that they were having financial problems. It didn’t occur to me that people might be spending past their limit and that the life he was projecting may not have been real.
Likewise people think rich people are having a great life. I shared before that I worked closely with rich people and went into their home to help with computer issues. Their lives were sad. Full of tragedy and distrust and stress. They were always afraid of their money being gone, and people only liking them because of their money.
I don’t have that problem. If people like me they know I am poor, so I don’t ever have to worry that someone likes me for benefits I could give them.
We are so paranoid about missing something in life, we invent theories and entertainment that reassurances us that we can’t miss anything. We invent multi-universes, were all possible combinations of our choices or factors out of our control happen. We may not be able to do everything in this life, but we have the fantasy that somewhere it has been done and by another version of us. How ridiculous is this? In those same timelines/universes, we have also a worse life or a life were we never existed. How is any of that relevant to our life now?
Now some religions like Mormonism will promise that you will become a god. How convenient. I grew up in that atmosphere, were men thought that they would be gods one day. If humans become a god then our universe is so fundamentally broken, then I’d rather not be a part of it. We see the terror in dictatorships, I can’t imagine the cruelty in an all powerful being.
What I saw growing up is men who thought they would be gods, who were the worst that humanity could produce. They thought they had a right to anything and no one could tell them no. They indulged their darkest and cruelest selves, and I didn’t want anything to do with that life. Cure FOMO by becoming a god in the afterlife? No thanks. I’d rather be toasting marshmallows with Lucifer.
I don’t know if there is an afterlife, but why do we look for things outside of ourselves to fix the fears and anxieties that we have? Isn’t it enough to do the best we can, and ultimately we will be judged by our legacy we left in the world? Is your legacy one where you were known to do everything you wanted, without regard for anyone else? Is that the meaning of your life?