You know, in our increasingly interconnected world,
when so many signals are competing for our attention,
we are essentially flooded by too much possibility.
We are overcome by bandwidth anxiety because
of the sheer paradox of choice, the paralysis,
the vertigo of freedom, as Timothy Leary says, we almost
like, can't help but suffer from an acute affliction of FOLO,
otherwise known as the fear of missing out.
And I'm reminded of a line from the movie, "Mr. Nobody," when
he says, "as long as you don't choose,
everything remains possible."
And there's kind of safety in abstaining
from actually committing to anything.
As long as you don't commit, you literally
reside in a multiverse of infinite possibilities.
You reside in a state of quantum super position.
The minute you commit to something,
when you choose one thing, you collapse
all other possibilities and you find yourself instead,
in the desert of the real, that state
of potentiality, that state before you make that commitment
is a state where anything can happen.
The minute you choose one thing, you've
effectively said no to everything else.
And there's a gnawing anxiety in realizing
that you can't possibly have it all.
You can't possibly mainline space and time
through the optic nerve and have and swallow it whole.
Because that whole line from the Bible about
you know, Adam taking from the tree of knowledge
and biting the apple.
You know, we didn't just bite the apple,
we swallowed it whole.
We want the whole thing.
And I think that's the reason that we suffer from this,
from FOLO, you know, because it's just,
it's intestinal to who we really are
and what we really long for, so much
more so much more than what we're currently privy to.
For that reason, I think that agitation is actually,
actually not a bad thing.
You know, if we suffer from fear of missing out,
it just shows that you have an intuition that there's
something greater.
Maybe I'm romanticizing the sort of affliction of our age,
but that's certainly what I choose to think.