Name: FOMO: Our Relationship with Social Media
Uploaded: 2023-01-01T21:02:00.000Z
Duration: 2 min 19 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

You log into social media and you see this picture of some friends at a party

Scroll down, and here's a video of a friend cliff diving in Cancun.

A number of friends are talking about garden cop, and you haven't seen it yet.

And now you start feeling something called FOMO, or fear of missing out.

FOMO is the anxiety we experience when we feel there's something exciting happening elsewhere and we're not a part of it.

It's been around for a long time, but these days it's triggered mostly by posts on social media.

Social media gives us instant access to the activity of our friends.

That's what it's there for, and this could be a good thing, but it also makes it all too easy for us to compare our lives to theirs.

This could lead us to second guessing our decisions and feeling insecure in general.

It can even get to the point when there's a looming sense of FOMO, even when we're not online.

An answer that might quickly spring to mind is to simply quit social media.

But that's not practical for a lot of people.

Instead of quitting, you can try limiting your time on it or even just taking a few days off.

This could give you a chance to focus on what's important in your life and enjoy the things that you are doing without comparing them to others.

The lives of our friends do sometimes look pretty exciting online, but let's put some quotation marks around the word "lives."

Their social media activity isn't their actual life per se.

It's more of a highlight reel of exciting things they've posted to contribute to their online identity.

It's easy to see these highlights and think, "My life just isn't as exciting as there's."

But what we're usually not seeing is what's going on behind the scenes, the negative things or the boring routine of their day-to- day lives.

They may post something awesome, but in the grand scheme of things, it's just a short snippet of their day.

The odds are when they're not out doing these awesome things, they probably experienced just as much FOMO as you do.