I feel like it’s the main reason I can’t stop my YouTube addiction, do you guys have any ideas ?
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.
