How To Deal With FOMO
Photograph by Alexander Schimmeck for Unsplash
Have you ever had a stone in your shoe?
You’re walking down the street, you’re in a hurry but you’re making good progress. And yet with every step forward you take, you’re reminded of the foreign object digging into your foot. It’s deeply unpleasant but you keep going – you’ll just ignore it for now.
Carrying dreams can feel that way.
Your career is developing nicely, you’re working on a great project—everything is flowing smoothly, you’re on an upward spiral. But there’s a stone in your shoe. “Remember, you were going to be a concert pianist?”, and all the joy is sucked out of your picture. The pride of what you’ve accomplished is soiled by a “should have”.
“I should have persisted with learning to play the piano. If I’d been more disciplined, by now, I’d be a professional. I might even be touring the world. My life would be way more interesting and I’d have lots of like-minded friends.”
You cling onto that dream. After all, it’s not too late. You heard of a man who took up the piano in his sixties and became a concert pianist. Maybe you could wait until retirement. You save the thought at the back of your mind where it can wait until later.
But it doesn’t want to wait until later. It wants to come out to play. It wants to play pretend. “What if... I hadn’t given up the piano?” You try to block the thought, but it won’t go. It wants to exist and it wants to be played out.
And it’s not alone: we lug around so many aspirations which have no place in our lives. They mingle with our true desires and start to look like them. We label them as dreams, but they’re not. They are simply aspirations that bug our minds with the feeling of failure.
Letting a dream play out is like writing a doorstopper book. Paul Auster did just that in his novel 4 3 2 1 where he explores four ways in which the main character’s storyline could develop. The result weighs in at 880 pages. With all these ‘dreams’ stored in your buffer zone—spinning around and sapping your feelings of contentment, asking for their storyline to be developed—it’s no wonder your brain goes into overdrive.
So, what do we do? How can we tell which ones should stay and which ones to dismiss? Well, we can start by looking at them with a magnifying glass, with the utmost respect. “What does being a concert pianist mean to me?” If the main reason is to get external validation, then you may want to put that aspiration to bed. But make sure you save the important other details, which you could find in another pursuit.
“Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.” – Albert Einstein
In an interview I once listened to, the guest explained how he spent his teenage years perfecting his technique on the electric guitar. He described his vision of success—girls, fame, money. When he finally joined a band, he quickly realised something shockingly simple. He hated carrying his guitar, amps and cables to rehearsal. That alone, ruined the fun of playing. The dream of becoming a guitar hero was made redundant. Years later, he continued to play the guitar for pleasure, but noticed that he craved performing in public. He discovered stand-up comedy and made a career of it. He found out which element of his guitar hero dream needed to be extracted and brought in to his life.
So yes, dreams can be a nightmare if you don’t examine them.
Can you find it in you to take one of your aspirations and inspect it under a magnifying glass?
Do any of your dreams make you feel like you’ve underperformed in life?
Is there an apparently unachievable dream, which haunts you time and time again?
I’d love to hear your thoughts here.
Wishing you all the very best with your creative endeavours!
Charlotte