The Tragedy of FOMO
We're so afraid of missing out that we miss what's most important
Hi-ho, Substackers. Once again, it’s been a while.
I haven’t stopped writing. I’ve just been struggling to find a balance between this type of writing and the writing that I have to do to pay the bills. Given the choice, I’d much rather be doing this — or journalism.
But I have been contributing to things outside of work! I recently had the privilege of adding to Terri Edward’s “Food & Faith” project at Eat Plant-Based with a piece on food as hospitality. And I had a lot of fun diving into nerdy brain science for my most recent article for The Epoch Times Health.
Other things are in the works. I’ve been pitching. I’ve been praying. And God seems to be opening some doors to new possibilities and potential possibilities. Not ready to share all the details yet — but I do think 2026 could get rather interesting.
Today’s piece is a slice of a bigger web of thoughts I’ve been pondering in recent months, mostly touched off by the continuing rise of AI. One of the questions the whole movement brings up: What is real?
I’m not attempting to answer that all at once. But I do think it’s time for us, as a society, to start thinking more about how we spend our time, where we put our attention, and how much we engage with the disembodied online world — a world that is becoming increasingly UNreal.
As always, thanks for coming back even when I’ve been quiet for a while.
Screen-induced “fear of missing out” may well be one of the greatest tragedies of our age. The endless news, events, and people filling the feeds that many of us spend vast chunks of our time interacting with have little to do with the contexts of our lives. Yet the deeper we allow ourselves to be drawn in, the more real the distant world behind our screens becomes. We fear putting down the phone lest we miss something important.
We’re overcome by FOMO.
C.S. Lewis recognized the danger of our predicament long before the advent of handheld screens. At time when newspapers and radio were the major mass distributors of information and TV was making its way into the mainstream, he wrote, “It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning.”
Today, we don’t have to wait for an evening radio program or the latest edition of the local paper to connect us with the wider world. We simply reach into our pockets any time we wish, open an app, and pull down to refresh.
In an instant, we gain access to articles, pictures, social media posts, podcasts, and videos from every corner of the world, delivered in an endless stream unbounded by the constraints of earlier media formats. We experience what Nicholas Carr refers to in his book, Superbloom, as “content collapse”: the removal of all categories and contexts that typically give information its meaning.
Describing the launch of Facebook’s News Feed feature, he writes,
*”It was just one thing after another: a video of a laughing baby, a news headline about a school shooting, a photo of a friend on vacation, an ad for a toenail fungus remedy, a contouring tip from a Kardashian, a story about microplastics in the ocean. ... Everything had the same semantic context, which was no context.”
Faced with a disconnected jumble of information stripped of any signal to help us discern its importance, we become emotionally engaged with places we’ll never go and people we’ll never meet. We become incensed by or depressed about events so far removed from our homes and neighborhoods as to have no bearing on them. We attach ourselves to influencers as if they were trusted friends, immersing ourselves in mediated snippets of their curated lives and somehow believing that we’re building a relationship with a person who doesn’t know us from the million other hangers-on cluttering the comments section. And each time our phone buzzes, we race to see the latest from the monetized news outlets, social platforms, and YouTube channels that clamor for our attention.
Disconnecting seems impossible, even unthinkable. The digital world has snaked its tendrils into every aspect of physical life. Even interactions with people we actually know aren’t immune to the intrusion. We get invitations through social media, find out what someone wants for their birthday from their Amazon registry, and hesitate make calls without texting first. What once involved face-to-face meetings or phone conversations now takes place through a screen.
And once we’ve engaged with that screen, it’s all too easy to be lured into the enticing stream of irrelevance waiting just a tap or swipe away. It’s such an integral part of our lives that we can’t bear to miss a moment.
We’ve become like Eve eyeing the forbidden fruit in the garden. It was beautiful. It looked delicious. And it consumed her attention. The serpent’s sly message hissed in her ears: “If you don’t eat that fruit, you’ll miss out on something important, something you need to have, something that will make your life so much better.” (Genesis 3:1-6)
How could she say no?
The consequences of modern-day FOMO are much the same. As with our first parents, our fear of life passing us by leads us into sin and robs us of God’s good gifts. The world behind our screens tempts us to envy others’ experiences, covet products we don’t need, and lament our circumstances because they don’t measure up to our favorite influencer’s meticulously staged life.
By the end of the day, most of us have wasted as many as six hours in a screen-mediated stupor.
Real life is relationship
If we looked up for just a moment, we would see that the interactions we’ve sacrificed to screen time are what form the very fabric of real life. But we’re so busy with endless streams of headlines and videos and posts that we’ve reduced these relationships to distracted messages sent in haste as we bounce between apps. We give more attention to talking heads on YouTube than to the people physically present around us. And, as Cal Newport points out in his book, Deep Work, “What we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore—plays in defining the quality of our life.”
In our quest to never miss out, we alienate ourselves from the connections that matter most. Our families. Our neighbors. Our friends. The faces we’d see and the voices we’d hear if we weren’t so preoccupied with the false, digitized realities we carry everywhere we go.
One deliberate choice is all it takes to break the cycle. The choice to forgo scrolling social media and instead strike up a conversation with the neighbor who walks his dog past the house every morning. The choice to turn off the phone and put it away so we can engage with our spouse and kids at the dinner table. The choice to invite a lonely widow or single college student into our home for a screen-free meal on a weekend or holiday.
Each choice moves us further away from the world of irrelevance and deeper into the embodied reality we were always meant to inhabit. And these interactions—some apparently small and incidental, others intense and impactful—build relationships that create a vibrant tapestry that no screen can replicate. The remote news and false relationships of the digital world pale in comparison to the tangible, enriching connections that God has placed in each of our lives.
How many precious hours could we reclaim with those people simply by refusing to fall victim to manufactured FOMO?