Fear of Missing Out

 I have not been writing in this blog consistently for the last few days or so, and my only excuse is that I have been hard at work on a paper for one of my classes, which compares Hindu and Buddhist sacrificial rituals.
    I have noticed, as I just started to formulate a topic for tonight, how much I miss the blog. Free writing is such a different style than the academic research writing which I have had to undertake recently, and I must say that it's a relief not to have to cite everything I write with a bibliographic reference! So there is a kind of stiffness I feel for not having free-written in a couple of days, combined with a sense of genuinely wanting to resume my daily blog writing.
     I was having this conversation the other day with a Chan practitioner about the proliferation of social media, and how it can become distracting at times to really practicing single-pointed awareness. I sometimes make it a habit to turn off my internet when coming home so that I can focus on writing a paper or reading a few academic articles. This measure is necessary because it is so easy to get distracted by the internet, similar to the way in which a person gets caught in wandering thoughts. Besides 'turning off the internet', is there any other way to avoid the tendency to surf?
    It seems that the most compelling driver for internet use is something called fear of missing out (which has even been abbreviated to FOMO!). I read an article which talked about how a lot of anxiety among young adults stems from this fear, particularly due to the proliferation of things and events that compete for a person's time and attention. With all the meetup groups out there, how does a person choose which to attend? If I attend one, for sure I will be in a position where I will have to forego the other, and so on.
    It seems that the ultimate remedy for FOMO is to see things with equanimity. One might think that staying at home is less glamorous than being downtown on a Friday night, but then one can recount the advantages of the former over the latter. Being at home means more time to relax, to catch up on one's reading, and to be in a warm place for a while. Is there not always an advantage to any state one is in? Even being in a traffic jam gives a person an opportunity to see that this stressful situation could always be worse, and isn't all that bad either. Consider: if I am in a traffic jam, at least I am not caught in the rain. It seems that these small gratitude reminders could help deal with the fear of missing out.