How many times do you find yourself feeling overwhelmed by a constant need to make sure you aren’t missing out on what's going on in the world? Nowadays there’s a well-known acronym for it: FOMO (fear of missing out). This tension associated with the fear of missing out can be linked to your close friends, or to work, or even to what’s going on in the world in general: whether it’s news, gossip, or the latest photo of your long-distant cousin’s baby, it almost feels like unless we are constantly checking our social media profiles, we simply can’t keep up.
From the rare perspective of someone who has chosen not to have one of the many social media profiles that seem to have a firm grip on the rest of the world population, Cal Newport offers us a bird’s eye view of some of the risks involved in being constantly connected.
Screens have become some kind of magnetic object that leads people to feel as if they no longer have the power to choose where they place their attention. People download apps to create their own profiles for very good reasons, only to find, however, with a sad irony, that all the services they have signed up for actually go against the precise values that made them seem like such a good idea in the first place.
Maybe this is not the case with something like Facebook, to which people tend to sign up to avoid losing touch with friends or relatives that live far away; but what often ends up happening is that we cannot help being distracted from our everyday human interactions in real life, because we are constantly checking our newsfeed!
We have known for a while now, the extent of the impact that social media has on our psychological well-being, especially on those who are more impressionable and who go to great lengths to show their followers how fantastic their lives are: adolescents feel a sense of inadequacy or often of exclusion during these delicate years, and it is amplified by their presence on social media.
Technological innovation has enormously increased the methods of communication available to us all, and allows us to communicate very easily from all around the world: for this, everything you need now fits into your pocket, but how many people end up becoming slaves to these devices rather than making the most of what they can offer us without losing control?
The answer is as clear as day: we only need to take a ride on public transport or walk down a busy street to see that out of ten people, maybe two (and this is being optimistic) don’t have their heads buried in their smartphones, to check their emails, flip through social media notifications, or just to skip to the next song.
Perhaps not everyone is aware of the existence of a movement that allows us to find that much sought-after balance between the one extreme of not being able to consider the idea of “disconnecting” for even a minute, and the other, of being completely anti-tech for fear of not being able to control the amount of time spent on these devices. Digital minimalism began with the aim of being able to enjoy all the positive features that technological evolution has to offer, while leaving behind its negative aspects.
