JOMO
I deleted my Facebook account this week. Wednesday night, stricken with Covid for the third time, I laid in bed doomscrolling, as I seem to do all the time lately. But my head hurt and my throat ached and I skidded into sleep - with the screen right next to me in bed. Of course when I woke up I got right back at it.
I was sick in bed, so what’s the big deal? I couldn’t get up and do anything. My head was too woozy to read. Just passing time. But time was passing. Hours of it. And what was I seeing? Dreck.
Some time ago Facebook replaced everything my friends had to post with endless ads, pointless memes, and music videos. I’d spin through the page. You know you’ve been on the app for a long time when you stump the algorithm and it runs out of things to feed you. Just a column of white boxes and a few glitches while the whole thing reloads, resets, and chokes out some more useless information. I thought I might miss something. In fact, I was missing everything.
I Googled how to delete my profile and release myself from Facebook’s grasp, which was actually quite difficult, and I did it. Today, in my ignorance of what might be happening in the focused world of screentime, I feel great.
Now, I have bipolar disorder and, excited, speedy and without much thought, I tend to take things too far. So I’m thinking of what other distractions I can purge from my life. There are the hours I spend watching Bloomberg on TV. I love business news, but I’m unemployed right now and I really should be getting a job instead of waiting on some data from labor analysts. Then there’s all the political journals I read. As we enter an election year that’s sure to be pure chaos fueled by deep fakes and AI generated misinformation, it might be liberating to step back from the barrage of partisan babble and engage in some critical thinking.
I have consciously chosen to miss out. Turns out so have a lot of people.
Every time I have what I think is an original idea I discover that so many people are thinking or doing the same thing that there’s already even a name for it. And so it goes with my withdrawal from the onslaught of information. As we move into 2024 the trend is to replace FOMO with JOMO: the joy of missing out.
It’s kind of a return to Traditionalism. A way to emphasize things that truly make you happy, pursue what moves you, focus on things that actually impact your life, and rediscover the joy that, burdened by opinions, battles, and the irrelevant, has become increasingly absent in an ever-connected world.
Certainly, this comes with a cost. I’ll feel a little out of touch. But before my first book came out in 2020 I wasn’t on social media at all. And life was just fine. I had good friends, enjoyed my family, and knew well what was going on in my community and the world. I’m sure I will again. Why did I go on social media when my book came out? A publicist told me I had to, and it will be harder to promote my work without connections online. But there are other ways. Plus, I’ll have more time to meditate, read spy novels, get in shape, teach my daughter guitar, cook, talk to my family, see a movie or two. And work.
I’ll be better able to return to the basics I emphasize in my book and pay some mind to my mind. My mental health hasn’t been great lately. I think JOMO is just what I need. It’s wrong to say I plan to disconnect. In fact, I plan on connecting in far more profound ways.