FOMO

All posts tagged FOMO

Just Shock Me

Posted by Mark Ridinger on September 3, 2014
Posted in: Musings. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

or… Just Shoot Shock Me.

In my previous piece, I advanced the need to coin some new terms that better reflect the true nature of—and the threat created by—the “fear of missing out”, or FOMO. Namely, that it is critical to be in a state of relaxed mindfulness and cognitive ease, as that is necessary for introspection, imagination and creativity, and FOMO is the antithesis of this.

A recent article in the New York Times entitled “No Time to Think”, correctly points this out and is worth a read:

“Researchers have also found that an idle mind is a crucible of creativity. ‘Idle mental processing encourages creativity and solutions because imagining your problem when you aren’t in it is not the same as reality,” said Jonathan Smallwood, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of York, in England. ‘Using your imagination means you are in fact rethinking the problem in a novel way.’”

The article goes on to highlight a recent and very disturbing study published in Science that found a significant number of people “began self-administering electric shocks when left alone to think. These same people… had previously said they would pay money to avoid receiving the painful jolt.” Clearly, we have become a culture that “values doing more than thinking and believes answers are in the palm of your hand rather than in your own head.”

It is one of the core themes of The Evolved Generalist to advance the idea that the true existential threat to any enterprise trying to compete in the 21st century is the failure to create a culture of mindfulness that nurtures innovation and inspiration.

The Science study shows just how difficult that can be, and should serve as a wake up call.

 

-Mark HT Ridinger

 

 

FOMO: scourge of the 21st century.

Posted by Mark Ridinger on September 2, 2014
Posted in: Musings. Tagged: , , . 1 Comment

FOMOIn case you don’t know, FOMO stands for “fear of missing out”. Why a scourge? It’s a major cause of our increasing inability to be mindful–or be in a state of cognitive ease necessary for introspection, imagination and creativity. FOMO on an email, twitter feed, RSS feed, facebook updates… you get the picture. Now I have seen recently some push back which is great. For example, someone coined the term JOMO–“joy of missing out”–and although I do appreciate the sentiment, the issue I have is that JOMO still implies that one is “missing out”. But instead of being anxiety riddled about it (FOMO), one can be happy about it instead.

We need then a new term, because the real “missing out” comes from the lost opportunities of succumbing to FOMO!

I propose here today some new terms that hopefully correctly communicate that by being in a state of FOMO, one is actually losing the chance to be maximally innovative, to achieve an “aha” moment, or epiphany or Eureka!, and thus to perhaps never discover a brilliant idea, new intellectual property, or a creative solution.

What about, then, FOFOMO? (“fallacy of the fear of missing out”), or fauxFOMO? Or we could be more fanciful and take the beautiful Portuguese term, saudade (which roughly means a longing for something that never really existed) and hence get neo-saudade!

Whatever that word or phrase is, the antidote may be best described by another foreign phrase– wei wu wei– which is an ancient Tao expression that means something like ‘achieving action with deliberate inaction’. After all, both common sense and neuroscience has shown that the mind must be put at rest in order to tap into the hidden subconscious churning that leads to epiphanies.

-Mark HT Ridinger