Ask a Literary Lady: I Love to Read But FOMO Keeps Me From It!

Let me guess—you’re curled up on the couch, buried in a novel, when all of a sudden your phone starts going off. Your friends are telling you to come out, you’re missing everything, now they’re going to a secret party, and you’ll never guess who is here! You try to go back to reading, but you keep checking your social media. Your friend has posted a photo of the secret party. Apparently every celebrity you know is there and there’s a water slide. You like water slides. But you’re not there, you’re at home.
You start to get anxious. What else are you missing out on? You scroll through your social media feed for more. While you were reading, fourteen friends got engaged, twenty friends won tickets to see Hamilton, and everyone else is on a private plane going to Vegas. You’re now panicking that life is passing you by and that if you keep spending nights reading at home, you’ll be perpetually left out.
If any of that sounds familiar, it’s because I’ve felt the exact same way many times before, and I know other readers have too. Reading is a quiet, solitary activity in a world that increasingly prioritizes hyper-social lifestyles full of shareable, photogenic moments.
Overcoming FOMO means that you may need to make few small changes in habits and in your thinking. Fortunately, it mostly requires drawing on skills you probably already have as a reader. Here are some things to try:
1. Unplug.
Don’t read with your phone near you, or your laptop open, or your TV on. Think back to the good old days when you’d read in your treehouse and if anybody wanted to talk to you, they had to climb up a rope ladder and know the secret treehouse knock. Be that kid again.
2. Take a little break from social media.
It doesn’t have to be a long break. Just tell yourself you’re not going to check it for a weekend. Or a week. See if you can go a month. The point isn’t to ban social media from your life, the point is to prove to yourself that it’s not relevant. After a week or a month, you’ll realize that you didn’t actually miss anything. Who knew you could live a full and meaningful life without knowing what your coworker wore to yoga class that morning?
3. Think of social media as a work of fiction.
Because it is. Everyone’s social media feed is a work of fiction about their own lives, complete with illustrations! You can find other people’s social media entertaining and fascinating, but much like other fictional novels you read, don’t give it too much weight or confuse it with reality.
4. Use social media to your advantage.
This may seem counterintuitive because I just told you to unplug, untweet, unscroll, and unfollow for a little while. But I also know that, realistically, you still want to be an active presence on social media. So I suggest that you own it and talk about your literary life alongside everything else. Talk about the books you’re reading, share quotes, ask for reading recommendations, and recommend books to others.
5. Give others FOMO.
Stop looking at other people’s lives and wishing you were there. Think about how much fun you’re having and share it with just as much enthusiasm. Someone’s asking why you’re not at such-and-such event? Because you have Girl Scout Cookies and wine and an incredible new novel that you’ve been waiting to come out for months. They’ll start thinking, “Is everyone reading that? Am I out of the loop? Why am I wearing uncomfortable shoes and yelling over bad music when I could be enriching my literary knowledge?”
6. Know the difference between symbols vs. experience.
We probably all know someone who puts intellectual books on their shelves, but never actually read them. If you don’t do that with books, don’t do that with your life. Don’t go somewhere or do something just to post a symbol of it when you don’t actually enjoy it. Don’t think about what others will feel when they see what you do, think about how you will feel.
7. Pick your experiences in life the way you choose books.
How do you choose the books you read? You heard about it and it intrigued you, or a good friend recommended it to you, or you’ve read other books by the same author? Whatever it is, every time you choose a book you’re saying, I’m curious enough to immerse myself in 300 pages and devote several hours of my life to discovering what this book is about. Choose your experiences the same way. Look at a bunch of options and say, “This is what I want to do. I chose this out of myriad of options, and this will have my undivided attention for the next few hours.” Then go do it and don’t look back.
Any other readers out there struggle with FOMO? What do you do to quiet the anxiety and get back to enjoying your book?
Love and paperbacks,
Literary Lady