FOMO

I grew up in Northern Virginia (Annandale, in Fairfax County, to be exact), and my father worked for the federal government. We got the Washington Post every morning and watched the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite every evening. We listened to the radio occasionally, but not all the time. We felt like we understood what was going on in the country and around the world.

With so much more information available at the press of a button – well, an icon on my phone – why do I feel uninformed? News organizations used to have a daily stopping point – there was an 11:00 pm daily news summary, but I was never awake for it. The next time we focused on the news was over breakfast the next morning, and then became aware of events only when something broke through the silence. One example was the assassination of President Kennedy. Television stations broke through their regular programming to offer virtually constant news coverage. I remember these times because they didn’t happen very often.

But now major events like court rulings and executive orders are announced at all hours of the day and night. The President makes news with his two am Tweets. MSNOW’s opening theme every time it returns after a commercial break is Breaking News.

FOMO – Fear of Missing Out – is a real thing. It is an individual sense that something fun or important is happening and you’re not part of it. I consider myself generally well-informed and smart enough to understand things. But I push myself to stay on top of the news because I don’t want to be the person who doesn’t know something important – or even something trivial that helps me understand something important.

FOMO carries mental health risks – increased anxiety, sleep disruption, difficulty concentrating, and compulsive checking behaviors. Overall, daily life is less satisfying because of the fear that you’ve missed something. In an odd reversal of expectations, the more information people consume in a crisis, the less confident they feel about understanding it.

FOMO feels especially strong now because of structural changes in the way we access news:

• Smartphones create permanent and immediate access

• Social media makes awareness visible in the ‘everybody’s talking about this’ sense

• Algorithms prioritize urgeny and conflict

• News cycles reward speed over reflection

The result of all of this is the fear that if you stop paying attention, you’ll lose your place in the narrative and that it will be difficult – or impossible – to catch up.

One suggestion I’ve read is to create scheduled news windows throughout the day. I already do that pretty well – I catch up on events over my morning coffee, I watch a midday news program, and we watch the news (for too long) in the evening – usually from 4 until 7. We catch the latest news sometime after 10 each night.

I’m going to cut back on my news consumption, not by going cold turkey but by reducing my hours of attention. I’ll keep my morning and noonish times, but cut back on my late-afternoon and evening times. Much of what goes on in these time periods is analysis rather than news, so I can reduce that withouto missing much.

I’ll read my daily Substacks from people whose insights I trust. I’ve winnowed that list down to about a dozen authors, and I’ll read what they write rather than scroll through mindless algorithm-fed social media posts.

I’ll let you know how it goes.