Have you ever spent a quiet evening on the couch, opening Instagram and suddenly feeling an emptiness in your stomach? While you’re in your pajamas watching a series, the world seems to explode with life: aperitifs in incredible places, breathtaking sunsets, groups of friends laughing out loud. In a moment, your well-deserved relaxation turns into FOMO: the fear of being cut off, of wasting the best years of life.
The problem is not the photo itself, but the fact that we started to exchange an accurate selection of moments for everyday reality. At school they teach us literature and history, but no one explains how to manage the weight of an algorithm that constantly compares us with the best (and often filtered) version of the others.
This invisible competition generates a performance anxiety that affects our entire identity. We must be “aesthetic”, we must have the hobby of the moment, we must always be part of something memorable.
We are the most connected generation ever, yet we often feel terribly alone in our not feeling “enough”. The truth is that the average life of a high school student is not a 15-second montage with music in the background. And that’s fine.
Maybe it’s time to clear the JOMO (Joy Of Missing Out): the joy of missing things. Claiming the right to turn off the phone and not knowing what others are doing. Not for asociality, but to find the taste of what we are doing, at that moment, without necessarily having to document or compare it.
The next time you feel that sense of inadequacy watching a story on a screen, remember that you are watching a trailer, not the full movie. The reality is much more messy, imperfect and, precisely for this reason, much more interesting than a successful filter.
Asaro Mirjam, 3CC
