How FOMO Leads Us Astray — Julia Starr Coaching

Oct 6

Oct 6 How FOMO Leads Us Astray

The “fear of missing out”, otherwise known as FOMO, started trending around 2004, when social media really started to take off and we gained a window into the lives (or at least the highly edited, curated lives) of friends, family members and far-off acquaintances.

We laugh about FOMO, make memes about it, and, for my generation at least, have accepted it as an assumed fixture of our lives.

The question I want to raise is, how much is FOMO really influencing our decisions? What proportion of our decisions are misaligned with our own interests because of it? And, maybe most importantly, what can we do about it?

Ultimately, we are social creatures. We want to be part of the community. We mimic each other to show that we have shared values, that we like each other, and that we don’t pose a threat through the cognitive dissonance of deviating from the norm.

This is not new.

However, what IS new, is our overwhelming ability to take the pulse of our “community”, as well as how wide we can throw the net of “community”, reaching new “norms” that historically haven’t been in our social landscape.

I’m going to take on this subject matter for the entire month of October and encourage you to follow along. Please subscribe to my newsletter in order to stay up-to-date on my posts, follow me on IG to join the conversation live, and make sure to connect on LinkedIn for upcoming workshops on the subject matter!