How to deal with FOMO (Fear Of Missing out)

Perspective shift.

Imagine zooming out of your body, into the sky, looking down at all the people and land and everything.

You can't keep up with all that, right? But is most of it really worth much? Is a squirrel eating a nut over yonder really all that important?

Your attention is always limited in scope, but it's existing in a nearly unlimited world. So you have to manually constrain it with your own conscious decision-making. Goals are helpful in this.

Can also help to relieve the FOMO on actually genuinely important things to you by setting up a nice system that feeds you the news you want. There's lots of services.

One thing that honestly helped me with this was watching this video about the size of everything in our observable universe.
It's this type of thinking that helped me reduce my indecision. When I'm faced with a huge menu, I try to go with my first instinct instead of waffling, reminding myself that there's no way to experience everything, but I'll have more time to experience more if I spend less time paralyzed by choice.

It's so ironic.

You are missing out on life when being stuck on YouTube, but you are afraid of missing something on YouTube. :)

It might be good to join some in-person community to replace YouTube FOMO with real-life FOMO. I don't care personally about YouTube happenings because I don't know the people and have no reason to know them, unlike my friends in a cappella.

Ultimately I think it's about self-confidence, but converting parasocial FOMO to real-life FOMO can be a useful intermediate step.

My experience with "bad" emotions: you can't really control them, all you can do is control how you react to them. Becoming comfortable with negative feelings is a valuable life skill that will always serve you well. So, accepting negative feelings (FOMO) and not fleeing from them (back into YouTube) is an important first step here.

Then, change the narrative. If you feel FOMO, channel it to:

Reading a book
Playing a game
Watching TV
Doing some kind of fun hobby

Gradually you will feel less FOMO and more interest in the activities you use to replace it. But it will suck and you will backslide. It's okay, it's a process.

Part of changing the narrative is also to engage in less structured activities that induce FOMO in you. Are your friends (or a specific friend) creating FOMO for you when you interact out with them? Do the feelings happen more when you engage with a specific social media platforms? Is there a time of day or a particular place that creates it more than others?

Changing your habits to avoid those triggers will gradually reduce your feelings as well.

Two sayings come to mind, "You can't do everything" and "Variety is the spice of life."

There is not enough time/energy/money to do everything. Life is short, pick and choose what you do and try to experience all the different things you can.

Once you let go of feeling like you need to do everything it's liberating. You can make your own path, but still do things you used to do as well.

Accepting the “missing out” part is the hardest battle to overcome, but I like to think of it in terms of active versus passive.

There are only so many minutes during a day and every minute spent doing one thing means that is a minute not doing something else. If I have to choose how to spend one minute or sixty, I choose between active and passive activities. It’s perfectly fine to do a passive activity, but every minute spent in something passive - that is, something that does not require you to entirely engage - is a minute away from something active - that is, something that does require your full engagement.

Obviously, you can’t spend a full day on “active” activities or you would readily burn out, but life is generally more pleasurable when we engage in something active versus passive. It’s more “doing versus seeing. So, take an hour and watch something on YouTube, but make it a relaxation from a number of active activities rather than endlessly watching without getting anything else out of it.

I'm sorry but could you describe your YouTube addiction? I just don't understand how someone can be addicted to YouTube or how FOMO happens in that scenario.

Missing out new videos, new memes, trends (in yt shorts) I guess I also have a parasocial relationship with one YouTuber (I started to stop looking at his videos because it was obsessive and we doesn't share any politics opinions anymore) so yeah...
- Ah, alright. It's good to work towards ridding yourself of an addiction, but it needs to be replaced by a healthier alternative. It sounds to me like you would benefit from nore social stimulation. Maybe join a hobby club or group of some sort, then you can involve yourself more in that where you get a different kind of satisfaction from learning / doing something new.
  
  I know that sounds cheesy but there are tons of things going on besides digitally; check out what's happening locally, there are probably other people who want to change up their habits with something different too and summer is a great time to do it. At the very least you could start cutting back the amount of time you spend on YouTube and work some other things into your daily routine.

"It takes all kinds" is something I have remind myself when comparing myself to others. If were all the same we would be collectively lesser for it.

I quit reddit for a whole two years at one point. It obviously didn't work out forever, evidenced by the fact that I'm here right now. But when I did quit, I found that it sucked for the first two weeks or so, but once I started to forget about the finer details of reddit and things like that, then I just stopped caring. It's like you start to forget about what you're missing out on after a little while, or you get used to missing out and just stop caring.

So that's what I would recommend. Try quitting cold turkey and being disciplined about not checking YouTube for at least two weeks. See if the same thing happens to you, where you just get used to missing out and stop caring.

I can't say it will work for everyone, but I saw therapy to help me control my anxiety related to my OCD. It really helped me accept things outside of my control and to just move on when there are things that trigger me.

Everything is an opportunity cost. That is, if you're engaging in YouTube you are missing out on something else. It's fine if that's the choice you want to make, but understand that you're "missing out" on hanging out with friends or reading or video games or calling a family member.

I try to ask myself what the motivation of the FOMO is. Does it come from me, or is the platform/game/whatever designed to make me feel that way?

If it's coming from the design of the thing, and I notice that design, that can immediately change my attitude toward it. It's not "I want to play one more game" anymore, it's "this game is pressuring me to play one more game." Does the game have my best interests at heart? Am I comfortable with being pressured by this game? I find those questions really reframe the FOMO and help me step back from it.

If the FOMO is actually coming from me, now it's a question of priorities. If I'm spending time watching one more video on this platform, there's something else I'm not going to get to. So the question for myself is "out of all the things I can be doing right now, is this the thing I want to do most?" Sometimes the answer is yes! I might take want to catch up on the latest news if I haven't checked in today. But if I've been doomscrolling for hours, the answer is probably no. And framing that as a choice between a bunch of activities instead of the simple FOMO choice of one more click makes that easier to see.

I don't have this problem with YouTube but I have this with video games. What I do is remember that I'm one person, I can never experience everything. With any form of media, what I get to experience is what I get to experience. Even though I don't have much, as long as I get to experience something that's new to me, even if it's old, I'm still happy with it.

Well, I'd say find something else interesting to do. I'm not sure if this is replacing one addiction with another. But maybe you can find something healthy to do. And replacing a behaviour with something else is probably easier than giving it up and keeping a 'hole' there.

Changing one's behaviour isn't easy most of the time. But certainly possible. The other commenters are correct. You're not missing out by not spending time on youtube. Also keep in mind, social networks, youtube etc are meant to be addictive so you spend your time and attention there, so they can make money.

I subscribed to too many YouTubes. Then I tried to watch all the good videos from the YouTubes I was subscribed to.

I can sort of almost keep up? If I go and watch YouTube constantly I can clear like 6 months' backlog in 2 months. But then at the end of the 2 months I'm like, was all that stuff really any better than the new stuff that's showing up today? Or than the other stuff I would have been watching or listening to? And the answer is really no.

So I think next time I take an interest in YouTube I'm not going to try and clear the backlog. It's not like it won't be there later; if I hear of a great video, I can go and watch it. And anything that won't be there latter is deliberately designed to exclude me, so why would I want it?

Whatever you decide to participate in, you're participating in that thing. You can't actually participate in anything if you keep going around trying to participate in everything at once.