Join me each week as we explore awareness, human behavior, and the small daily choices that shape our lives. As a thank-you for joining, you'll receive my free guide, 13 Hidden Patterns that Quietly Control Your Life, to help you begin recognizing the hidden patterns that quietly influence your thoughts, habits, and daily decisions.
What If FOMO Is About More Than Missing Out?
What If FOMO Is About More Than Missing Out?The fear that I might be missing out on the good in my own life. You know, the fear of missing out. It’s everywhere in advertising and marketing. Only a few left. Don’t miss out. Sale ends tonight. I originally connected FOMO to greed because I started seeing greed differently. Instead of simply wanting too much, sometimes greed grows from the fear that there won’t be enough. Enough security. Enough opportunity. Enough time. Enough life. Then I started recognizing it in places that had absolutely nothing to do with buying something.
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One of the most personal stories in Beyond Sin appears in Chapter 3, “Envy: The Illusion of Missing Life.”
It happened while I was working outside in the heat.
Cars kept passing me.
Some looked like families going somewhere. Some were probably heading to restaurants. Others could have been going anywhere.
And there I was.
Working.
Sweating.
Trading another day of my life for a paycheck.
My mind started filling in everything I didn’t know about the people in those cars.
They’re free.
They’re enjoying their day.
They’re living while I’m stuck here working.
Of course, I didn’t actually know anything about them.
Maybe they were headed to work too.
Maybe they were struggling financially.
Maybe the smiling family I imagined wasn’t smiling at all.
But envy doesn’t need the whole story.
It can take a tiny glimpse of someone else’s life and fill in everything that’s missing.
That’s exactly what I was doing.
Meanwhile, I was thinking about my granddaughters and the little boy being added to our family.
I don’t want to be the Poppa who is always at work.
I want to be the Poppa who is always THERE.
If they’re home from school, I want to be there.
If they want to go hiking, I want to go.
If there’s an ordinary Tuesday that somehow becomes one of those memories they carry for the rest of their lives, I want the freedom to be part of it.
When I wrote Chapter 3, I was exploring how comparison can convince us that life is happening somewhere else while we’re stuck watching it pass by. That’s one of the strange things about envy: it can make someone else’s visible freedom feel like proof of our own imprisonment.
But recently I realized there was another fear hiding underneath that story.
FOMO.
I wasn’t really afraid that those people driving past me had something I didn’t.
I was afraid of missing my own life.
More specifically, I was afraid of missing theirs.
That hit differently.
Interestingly, research suggests FOMO can run deeper than simply missing an event or experience. The American Psychological Association recently highlighted research showing that FOMO can also be intensified by concern about missing opportunities to connect with people who matter to us.
That makes me wonder if my desire to become an Always THERE Poppa contains more FOMO than I originally realized.
Then I Started Counting Years
Recently, I did some math that I probably could have gone my entire life without doing.
I’m 50.
I started thinking about retirement and how much of our lives we spend working toward it.
If someone retires at 65, that’s another fifteen years.
And suddenly my mind wasn’t thinking about retirement accounts, Social Security, or any of the other things we normally associate with retirement.
I was thinking about time.
How many years do I get?
How many of those years will I spend working?
And how many will be left when I finally have the freedom to enjoy the time I’ve spent decades trying to earn?
There it was again.
FOMO.
Except nobody was trying to sell me anything.
There wasn’t a countdown timer on a website.
There wasn’t a flashing advertisement telling me there were only three left.
There was just me realizing something uncomfortable:
I’m afraid of running out of life before I get enough time to live it the way I want.
That’s when this started connecting with another part of Beyond Sin.
In Chapter 14, “The Fear of Old Age,” and Chapter 15, “The Fear of Death,” I explore fears that become increasingly difficult to ignore as we become more aware that our time isn’t unlimited. Those chapters sit within the book’s larger exploration of the fears hiding underneath our everyday patterns.
My retirement math made those ideas much more personal.
I wasn’t simply asking whether I would have enough money.
I was asking whether I would have enough life.
Maybe FOMO Is Bigger Than I Thought
FOMO doesn’t always say:
Everyone is having fun without you.
Sometimes it says:
Everyone else is getting ahead.
Sometimes:
You don’t have enough.
Sometimes:
You’re running out of time.
Sometimes:
Your grandchildren are growing up.
And sometimes:
What if someday finally arrives and there isn’t much someday left?
The circumstances are different.
But underneath them is the same uncomfortable thought:
What if I miss my own life?
That’s a much deeper fear than missing a sale.
And strangely enough, I had already written about it without fully recognizing how connected these different fears were.
In Chapter 3, I wrote about how comparison shifted my attention away from everything meaningful that was already in my life and toward everything that appeared absent. Nothing about my actual circumstances had changed. My attention had.
Later in that chapter, I came to an uncomfortable realization.
Children keep growing.
Moments keep passing.
Life keeps happening.
And while envy convinces us we’re missing life, it can quietly steal our ability to experience the life already happening around us.
Now I see another layer to that idea.
The same thing can happen with FOMO.
We can become so afraid of missing life that the fear itself causes us to miss it.
Ouch.
There’s Nothing Wrong With Wanting More
I want to be careful here.
I don’t think the answer is to stop wanting things.
I still want more freedom over my time.
I still want to build the things I’m working toward.
I still want my books to succeed.
I still want to create enough financial independence that working becomes a choice rather than a requirement.
And I absolutely still want to be an Always THERE Poppa.
Those desires aren’t the problem.
In fact, they give me direction.
The question I’m beginning to ask is:
Am I moving toward something I value, or am I running from the fear that there won’t be enough?
Those can look almost identical from the outside.
Someone preparing responsibly for retirement and someone terrified of the future may both save money.
Someone building a business because they value freedom and someone terrified of wasting their life may both work late into the night.
Someone who loves their family and someone afraid of missing every moment may both rearrange their life to spend more time with them.
The action doesn’t always reveal what’s driving it.
Sometimes you have to look underneath it.
That’s one of the central ideas running throughout Beyond Sin.
Awareness asks us to stop long enough to notice what is actually controlling the moment.
I’ve explored this question from another direction in “Who Made Your Last Decision?” Sometimes the most important part of a decision isn’t what we chose, but recognizing what was influencing us when we chose it.
Someday Can Become a Dangerous Word
This brings me back to Chapter 6.
There’s a section in that chapter that means even more to me now than it did when I wrote it.
Preparation isn’t the problem.
Fear-based living is.
There’s wisdom in preparing for tomorrow.
There’s wisdom in saving money.
There’s wisdom in building something that could create a better future.
But there’s a difference between preparing for the future and emotionally living there.
The danger comes when life becomes:
Someday I’ll relax.
Someday I’ll have enough.
Someday I’ll have more time.
Someday I’ll enjoy life.
Someday I’ll finally be free.
Meanwhile…
Today disappears.
In Beyond Sin, I eventually reduced that feeling of scarcity to a simple list:
Enough time.
Enough money.
Enough security.
Enough certainty.
Enough life.
I think that’s what bothered me so much when I started doing the retirement math.
It wasn’t simply money.
It was the fear of whether there would be enough life left when I finally got there.
So What Do I Do With That?
I don’t have a magical answer.
I’m certainly not quitting my job tomorrow because I discovered FOMO.
I still have responsibilities.
Bills still arrive with remarkable consistency.
And unfortunately, nobody has informed the electric company that I’m trying to become an Always THERE Poppa.
So I’m going to keep building.
I’m going to keep writing.
I’m going to keep working toward greater control over my time.
I’m going to prepare for tomorrow.
But I’m also going to try to remember why I’m doing all of it.
Because becoming an Always THERE Poppa someday doesn’t mean much if I’m never really there today.
Financial freedom won’t give me back moments I failed to notice.
Retirement won’t return the Tuesdays that already passed.
And no amount of preparation can guarantee how many years any of us have waiting for us.
That’s where awareness changes the conversation.
The goal isn’t to eliminate the fear.
It’s to recognize when the fear has started making the decisions.
That’s really the journey I tried to build throughout Beyond Sin. The first part looks at patterns such as envy, greed, pride, wrath, sloth, gluttony, and lust. The second looks underneath those patterns at the fears that may be feeding them. Then the journey turns toward recognizing and interrupting those patterns through awareness and intentional choice. Beyond Sin 4.5 KDP.pdf
Awareness doesn’t guarantee that fear disappears.
It gives us a chance to notice when fear has started making the decisions.
Maybe that’s enough for today.
To notice.
To ask what is driving me.
And then consciously decide what deserves my attention.
Because I’m beginning to think the strangest thing about FOMO isn’t that we’re afraid of missing some future opportunity.
It’s this:
The more afraid we become of missing life, the easier it becomes to miss the life happening right now.
And I don’t want to miss it.
Go Deeper
This reflection grew from ideas I explore in Beyond Sin: Breaking Fear, Escaping Hell, and Building Heaven Through Daily Choice.
If this particular idea connected with you, three places in the book continue the conversation:
Chapter 3 — Envy: The Illusion of Missing Life
The Always THERE Poppa story and how comparison can convince us that life is happening somewhere else.
Chapter 6 — Greed: The Fear That Says “There Won’t Be Enough”
FOMO, scarcity, marketing, and the fear of never having enough—including enough time and enough life.
Chapters 14 & 15 — The Fear of Old Age & The Fear of Death
A deeper look at what happens when our awareness of time, aging, and mortality begins influencing how we live today.
They approach the problem from different directions, but each eventually brings me back to the same question:
What changes when we finally recognize the fear underneath the pattern?
Until Next Time,
Magus G.Mack
Don’t Be Like Me…Be Better.
A Message from Magus G.Mack
Join me each week as we explore awareness, human behavior, and the small daily choices that shape our lives. As a thank-you for joining, you'll receive my free guide, 13 Hidden Patterns that Quietly Control Your Life, to help you begin recognizing the hidden patterns that quietly influence your thoughts, habits, and daily decisions.