By Daniela Ivančáková Youth is a strange concept. We heard all about it in the songs and movies, we desired to be young when we were kids and possibly will again desire to be young 20 years from now. These should be the memories fading to yellow and orange, these should be the moments we will share repeatedly with our future friends, lovers, even kids. (photo: Pinterest, ‘gen’) Well, they talk about it all the time. It almost seems like an obsession, it’s in the tiny jealous spark in their eyes, even the way they pronounce ‘young’ has an oddly specific ring to it. We have been told repeatedly that this should be the greatest time of our lives and that it will be all gone once we turn 30. Yet, here we are, all curled up in the back seats of buses, looking at the grey shades of the world behind the window, waiting for them to turn colourful, as they told us they would. In our heads, we blame them for giving us this romanticized idea of chaos that we used to dream about ever since we could tell apart a child and an adult. We blame the parents, teachers, neighbours, poets, we compare their stories full of passion and freedom to our everyday life and differences hit us harder than we are willing to admit. And then there is FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out refers to the perception that others are having more fun, living better lives, or experiencing better things than you are), which, to be precise, 75% of us have struggled with at one point or another. They blame it on social media, the filtered moments we present as reality, and even though there is a piece of truth in that, it’s not all about the house party the other day that we’ve seen all our friends go to but weren’t invited. FOMO strikes on a much deeper level; it pokes the grey areas of who we are and who we want to become. Everyone has an image of a perfect self in their head and if the everyday reality doesn’t align with what our perfect selves would do, it feels like life is slipping through our fingers. Of course, these expectations are harsh, impossible even, because as a human being you have to rest or be bored sometimes, for both mental and physical health reasons, but those don’t apply to our perfect selves. We fear there are so many things we could have done and moments we could have experienced, which would have turned into those memories and funny stories, but we missed them. We fear we are missing out on something essential that would have changed our life path and made us different, better. (photo: Flickr) But we also love to live. Live, as in frolicking in the high grass, sleeping on the beach, dancing till we can’t breathe, or watching the misty sunrise in the mountains. Everything less exciting isn’t living, it’s simply surviving. That tends to be the basis for FOMO - we want to feel alive, make memories and romanticize to get the personal validation. Sometimes we manage to defamiliarize those tiny moments and suddenly the bike ride home seems like a movie, but this state of mind needs a lot of energy and exceptionally good mood. When that time comes and we are on top of the sinusoid, the fear of losing ‘it’ is so intense, that we try to prepare ourselves for when it happens. Envisioning how much we will miss and romanticize these times in a couple of months leaves us trapped in a strange circle of anticipatory nostalgia (‘the foreseeing of looking back on life events and expecting to feel nostalgic about it in the future’). It is so hard to enjoy the moment, to make every second count, when you can’t stop thinking about how much there is to lose. And then, because of our parents, teachers, neighbours and their nostalgia a pretty scary question arises. Is life after youth really that bad? It has to be, because we never hear them talk about it like they talk about youth, right? (photo: Flickr)
So, we try to grip the ‘best years of our lives’ harder. Even though they might not be as amazing as all those songs describe them to be. We are scared to lose them and even more scared of what’s to come after them. In the end, we all want these to be the memories fading to yellow and orange. We want these to be the moments we will share repeatedly with our future friends, lovers, even kids. References Batcho, K. I., & Shikh, S. (2016). Anticipatory nostalgia: Missing the present before it’s gone. Personality and Individual Differences, 98, 75–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.03.088 Baylor Study: Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) plus social media connections can Equal happiness. (n.d.). Media and Public Relations | Baylor University. https://news.web.baylor.edu/news/story/2019/baylor-study-fear-missing-out-fomo-plus-social-media-connections-can-equal#:~:text=FOMO%20is%20defined%20in%20the,young%20adults%20struggle%20with%20FOMO. a
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May 2024
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