Does anyone else experience FOMO?

Cover Photo by Heather Zabriskie on Unsplash

FO·MO | ˈfōmō |
noun informal
anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may currently be happening elsewhere, often aroused by posts seen on social media.

FOMO, or fear of missing out, can be paralyzing.

I'm starting to feel paralyzed.

Languages I don't know but want to learn, JavaScript frameworks, blockchain and Web3.0, new CSS features, Jamstack and serverless tooling, conferences, books, career development, "hustling"...

How do you manage it all?

Comments

[Oteng Kwame]

I read about them to just know what they are and move on with my life.

[Adam Davis]

I think it's important to come to peace with the fact that you'll always be missing out on something. Everything has opportunity cost. Time spent on one thing is necessarily time spent not doing something else.

But also keep in mind that with the attention economy, people are effectively selling hype in exchange for your attention. No technology is ever as exciting as the person gaining thousands of Twitter followers from hyping it makes it out to be.

In short, learn the things you need in order to accomplish concrete goals and try to not get too caught up in hustle culture.

[Keff]

The most important tip is, don't let the hype affect you.

Tackle one thing at the time, start with the basics, and progress to more complex topics (if you are interested in them of course). You shouldn't learn to drive a truck if you don't even know how to drive right? This is the same, start by learning the basics then start to poke at whatever tech you're interested in.

You can't learn everything, so I suggest focusing on what interests you the most, not just what other people say it's the cool thing at the moment. Otherwise each week you will need to switch to the new cool thing.

After a while, learning new things get easier as you have a base of knowledge that can usually apply to the new thing you want to learn. Just be patient and consistent, after some time things will start to make sense. If you learn let's say javascript in depth, then learning a framework is a alot easier.

Also, think that the new things will still be there after 1 year, or 2 (if not, they were not as cool or useful, so no need to learn them).

The main thing you should take away from this comment is:

• Focus on 1 or 2 things at once
• Don't let the hype affect you
• Little by little step into new things (that interest you)
• Most importantly you should enjoy the process

I hope this makes some sense, I could ramble for hours about this, but I think you will get the point!