Tag: FOMO

Refusing battles

“Pick your battles” is probably the most important thing I’ve learnt as a journalist. A lot of it is probably due to my firm belief that science has always been political, and getting people to see this has often left me grappling with difficult questions in a variety of areas, which in turn required my engagement with a diverse multiplicity of people, ideas, and problems. In the course of working like this as a journalist for a decade, I got to contribute to as well as publish some wonderful work. But it also took me a decade to be honest to myself and admit that I was going about all this the wrong way.

Constantly questioning myself and my privileges as I began my journalistic career had, over time, pressed into my skull the idea that, given the resources at my disposal, I could always do more than I was doing at any moment. So I took on more work, and more kinds of work, even as I began to interpret the resulting stress as an inability to be as efficient as necessary. By mid-2022, this misguided conflation had exacted a heavy toll on my body. My doctor immediately ordered a change in gears and my therapist helped me figure out that I hadn’t picked my battles. But I soon realised that the bigger mistake I’d made was underestimating how difficult declining all the other battles would be.

This is FOMO but it’s also more than that. One way to define caste, class, and gender privilege in India (the benefits of all of which I enjoy, by the way) is to say that more privileged people can afford to fight more battles than less privileged people. Privileged bodies can also tolerate more harm (accidental, not deliberate) because they can afford good doctors and healthier living environments. But this sort of thinking misses the point, I realised later, because it overlooks sustainability. Performing 100 units of work and then fizzling out after five years is not better than performing eight units of work per year for many years. The latter is also advantageous because spending more time doing something allows you to persist – and enhance your credentials – in that community, establish more as well as stronger relationships, and mentor people. These things in turn bring advantages that working by oneself never will.

You probably already know all of this, but I want to make sure you know one more thing: not trivialising the allure of the battles you’ve decided to overlook. This problem is more than FOMO because FOMO implies a temptation to do something. But when you’re a privileged person and you’ve decided that you’re not going to fight some battle, you also need to deal with the allegations – both self-inflicted and inflicted by others, especially by people in your own circles and sometimes publicly – of having abdicated your privileges. Instead of not giving in to the resulting temptation, as with FOMO, you need to not give in to the resulting shame.

When I first experienced it, my self-esteem plummeted. I found myself clutching at straws when, for example, someone tagged me on Twitter demanding to know why I couldn’t do something about a news report with average writing, put out by the publication I worked at (along with hundreds of other journalists). The old me would have sprung into action, messaging the relevant editors, going into why XYZ is problematic, and becoming entangled in increasingly vexed follow-ups. But I’ve found that the shame eventually calcifies into a kind of courage, one that allows me today to say – after a few deep breaths – that while I’m sure XYZ is an important problem, I’m not going to pay much attention to it.

End of a tab-hoarding era

Google Chrome just pulled the plug on the Great Suspender browser extension. The Great Suspender allowed its users to keep lots of tabs open at any time on Chrome without guzzling RAM, which Chrome is notorious for – simply by keeping the tab open but not displaying any of the page’s contents. When a user does need to view the page’s contents, they could just click the ‘frozen’ page and the tab’s contents would load then. So by getting the RAM consideration out of the way (mostly), the Great Suspender engendered certain questionable browsing habits, like believing that I could read everything I discovered on the internet or had been shared with me (and which was worth reading, of course) if only I could keep track of them. At last check, my Great Suspender extension was handling 48 tabs.

Now that Google has eliminated the extension without nary a warning, I – like many thousands of users – find ourselves suddenly bereaved, with a giant tab-shaped hole in our lives. I’m not even sure, even though a few hours have passed, if I’m feeling good or bad about this. The reason appears to be that the extension’s original developer sold it to another, unknown person in June 2020, this person snuck in some malicious code in a subsequent version, and it’s been downhill from there (more info and some technical workarounds here).

There are of course other extensions like this one, especially now that this particular one is no more, but the Great Suspender also came recommended from many of those tech-news sites like Mashable. I also don’t have the competence to independently judge how good and safe each one is. Perhaps more importantly, for tech-semi-illiterate or -illiterate people like me, to discover that extensions like the Great Suspender can include and run malware also imposes another layer of wariness towards add-ons, plug-ins, etc. It’s another issue to evade, yet another point to look out for in articles recommending these things, and until I get a recommendation that’s that robust, I’m going to give extensions of this sort a skip.

This also means I need to pay more attention to how I spend my time online. Without being able to hoard tabs, I need to focus on pages I’m likelier to consume soon instead of mindlessly trawling through everything that strikes my fancy. A laptop with more RAM is also out of the question considering how costly they have become. A couple small mercies: I don’t have to give up the luxury of being able to reading an article long after I’ve discovered it, when I’m in just the mood for it, thanks to Pocket.

Update (8:42 am, February 7, 2021): As one reader pointed out, there’s also One Tab – an extension that allows users to collect links to multiple tabs in a single page with the click of a button, and restores them with similar ease. But while it seems like a different way to execute the same paradigm, of working around Chrome’s RAM needs, it may also impose an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mindset that allows users to ‘collect’ tabs en masse but may not help them remember that they’re there. So using One Tab to dispense the same duties that the Great Suspender did will also require behaviour change, which is costly. So let’s see.

In defence of ignorance

Wish I may, wish I might
Have this wish, I wish tonight
I want that star, I want it now
I want it all and I don’t care how

Metallica, King Nothing

I’m a news editor who frequently uses Twitter to find new stories to work on or follow up. Since the lockdown began, however, I’ve been harbouring a fair amount of FOMO born, ironically, from the fact that the small pool of in-house reporters and the larger pool of freelancers I have access to are all confined to their homes, and there’s much less opportunity than usual to step out, track down leads and assimilate ground reports. And Twitter – the steady stream of new information from different sources – has simply accentuated this feeling, instead of ameliorating it by indicating that other publications are covering what I’m not. No, Twitter makes me feel like I want it all.

I’m sure this sensation is the non-straightforward product of human psychology and how social media companies have developed algorithms to take advantage of it, but I’m fairly certain (despite the absence of a personal memory to corroborate this opinion) that individual minds of the pre-social-media era weren’t marked by FOMO, and more certain that they were marked less so. I also believe one of the foremost offshoots of the prevalence of such FOMO is the idea that one can be expected to have an opinion on everything.

FOMO – the ‘fear of missing out’ – is essentially defined by a desire to participate in activities that, sometimes, we really needn’t participate in, but we think we need to simply by dint of knowing about those activities. Almost as if the brains of humans had become habituated to making decisions about social participation based solely on whether or not we knew of them, which if you ask me wouldn’t be such a bad hypothesis to apply to the pre-information era, when you found out about a party only if you were the intended recipient of the message that ‘there is a party’.

However, most of us today are not the intended recipients of lots of information. This seems especially great for news but it also continuously undermines our ability to stay in control of what we know or, more importantly, don’t know. And when you know, you need to participate. As a result, I sometimes devolve into a semi-nervous wreck reading about the many great things other people are doing, and sharing their experiences on Twitter, and almost involuntarily develop a desire to do the same things. Now and then, I even sense the seedling of regret when I look at a story that another news outlet has published, but which I thought I knew about before but simply couldn’t pursue, aided ably by the negative reinforcement of the demands on me as a news editor.

Recently, as an antidote to this tendency – and drawing upon my very successful, and quite popular, resistance to speaking Hindi simply because a misguided interlocutor presumes I know the language – I decided I would actively ignore something I’m expected to have an opinion on but there being otherwise no reason that I should. Such a public attitude exists, though it’s often unspoken, because FOMO has successfully replaced curiosity or even civic duty as the prime impetus to seek new information on the web. (Obviously, this has complicated implications, such as we see in the dichotomy of empowering more people to speak truth to power versus further tightening the definitions of ‘expert’ and ‘expertise’; I’m choosing to focus on the downsides here.)

As a result, the world seems to be filled with gas-bags, some so bloated I wonder why they don’t just float up and fuck off. And I’ve learnt that the hardest part of the antidote is to utter the words that FOMO has rendered most difficult to say: “I don’t know”.

A few days ago, I was chatting with The Soufflé when he invited me to participate in a discussion about The German Ideology that he was preparing for. You need to know that The Soufflé is a versatile being, a physicist as well as a pluripotent scholar, but more importantly The Soufflé knows what most pluripotent scholars don’t: that no matter how much one is naturally gifted to learn this or that, knowing something needs not just work but also proof of work. I refused The Soufflé’s invitation, of course; my words were almost reflexive, eager to set some distance between myself and the temptation to dabble in something just because it was there to dabble. The Soufflé replied,

I think it was in a story by Borges, one of the characters says “Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be.” 🙂

To which I said,

That was when the world was simpler. Now there’s a perverse expectation that everyone should have opinions on everything. I don’t like it, and sometimes I actively stay away from some things just to be able to say I don’t want to have an opinion on it. Historical materialism may or may not be one of those things, just saying.

Please bear with me, this is leading up to something I’d like to include here. The Soufflé then said,

I’m just in it for the sick burns. 😛 But OK, I get it. Why do you think that expectation exists, though? I mean, I see it too. Just curious.

Here I set out my FOMO hypothesis. Then he said,

I guess this is really a topic for a cultural critic, I’m just thinking out loud… but perhaps it is because ignorance no longer finds its antipode in understanding, but awareness? To be aware is to be engaged, to be ‘caught up’ is to be active. This kind of activity is low-investment, and its performance aided by social media?

If you walked up to people today and asked “What do you think about factory-farmed poultry?” I’m pretty sure they’d find it hard to not mention that it’s cruel and wrong, even if they know squat about it. So they’re aware, they have possibly a progressive view on the issue as well, but there’s no substance underneath it.

Bingo.

We’ve become surrounded by socio-cultural forces that require us to know, know, know, often sans purpose or context. But ignorance today is not such a terrible thing. There are so many people who set out to know, know, know so many of the wrong ideas and lessons that conspiracy theories that once languished on the fringes of society have moved to the centre, and for hundreds of millions of people around the world stupid ideas have become part of political ideology.

Then there are others who know but don’t understand – which is a vital difference, of the sort that The Soufflé pointed out, that noted scientist-philosophers have sensibly caricatured as the difference between the thing and the name of the thing. Knowing what the four laws of thermodynamics or the 100+ cognitive biases are called doesn’t mean you understand them – but it’s an extrapolation that social-media messaging’s mandated brevity often pushes us to make. Heck, I know of quite a few people who are entirely blind to this act of extrapolation, conflating the label with the thing itself and confidently penning articles for public consumption that betrays a deep ignorance (perhaps as a consequence of the Dunning-Kruger effect) of the subject matter – strong signals that they don’t know it in their bones but are simply bouncing off of it like light off the innards of a fractured crystal.

I even suspect the importance and value of good reporting is lost on too many people because those people don’t understand what it takes to really know something (pardon the polemic). These are the corners the push to know more, all the time, often even coupled to capitalist drives to produce and consume, has backed us to. And to break free, we really need to embrace that old virtue that has been painted a vice: ignorance. Not the ignorance of conflation nor the ignorance of the lazy but the cultivated ignorance of those who recognise where knowledge ends and faff begins. Ignorance that’s the anti-thing of faff.