FOMO - Fear Of Missing Out

Someone has identified a global phenomenon (it has to be global these days), and even given it an acronym which makes it kosher among the trendy set -- Fear Of Missing Out, FOMO. It is all around us and among us.

The adolescent never more than an arm’s reach from the cellphone... The mindless communication: “What are you doing? Nothing... What are you going to do? Dunno...”

The mother to whom it is vital that “my daughter and I have no secrets from each other -- she tells me everything”. Oh yeah? It would be a crisis should she find out that her daughter had done something, experienced something, thought something, met somebody, without the mother knowing first. The sadness of this quite often is, not so much the mother’s illusion of uninterrupted openness as it may have been years ago, but that it may be slightly true -- the adult daughter may actually be more open still with her mother than she is with her husband, partner, lover, co-tenant, or whatever she’s got. I recall a young parishioner in Scotland whose husband had just stupidly turned down a wonderful job offer in Canada -- she said to me, “Oh, but I couldn’t leave me mum...!”

Then we have the church’s high art of gossip. Seemingly mature people in the church can fall out with each other because gossip was withheld from one to the other. “You didn’t tell me...!” Confidentiality, respect for privacy and dignity, can be at a high premium in the parish church. It may be that I am over sensitive about this. I am also aware that there are plenty of people who actually think they have some right to information, accurate or distorted, about others. FOMO is a living reality in the church. St Benedict, who is important to me, was very much aware of gossip and opposed to it.

I suppose the fear of being left out of the loop is pretty basic. A couple of colleagues recently told me some information about another colleague, which I hadn’t known. My initial reaction was, I am sorry to have been told that. I didn’t need to know. And indeed, the “Need To Know” principle is always worth bearing in mind.

A real and mature challenge is to form our own assessments of people with love and charity, and constant awareness of human frailty, without the help of gossips and tittle-tatlers. After all, our need is not to pin labels on others, which will always be only marginally accurate (and we don’t like it when they do it to us), but to practise hospitality and openness and exercise generous judgement.