Envy Epidemiology

Help stop the spread of social anxiety. A fact sheet. 

FOMO (fear of missing out) and status anxiety are highly contagious social anxieties. 😨

What are they?

The fear of being excluded from knowledge, experiences, and interactions (FOMO), and consequentially being considered unsuccessful by society (status anxiety).

What Are the Symptoms?

Sleeplessness, worry, lack of attention, feelings of inadequacy when comparing your life choices to that of others. 

However, very few people are self-aware enough to know if these symptoms are being caused by social anxiety.

How are they Spread?

1. Through face to face contact.

Particularly at parties and night-time gatherings. 🥂

Common scenario: A carrier complains about a 'problem' in their life concerning their high-status job, speculative investment, or over-achieving child, infecting the listener with apprehension as to why they are missing out on similar challenges.

2. Electronically.

FOMO and status anxiety are more contagious over social media and the internet, where information-sparse posts can be re-framed by our insecurities into self-criticism. 📱

Common scenario: A post of a friend dining with colleagues may make us feel like sh@te for not having a job.

How Do I Get Tested?

The psychological symptoms are quickly sublimated and expressed in behaviours such as conspicuous and compensatory consumption. 🛍🛒

A quick self-test:

• Have you recently purchased, or plan to purchase, a status good that you did/do not need, like an overseas holiday, investment property, or SUV?
• Have you recently purchased an unnecessary item based on a friend's recommendation?
• Are you in consumer debt?

If you answered 'yes' to any of the above, then you have likely contracted FOMO and/or are acting under the influence of status anxiety.

What Should I Do if I Am Infected?

Traditional treatments for status anxiety focus on 'status' and include: setting ambitious goals, hustling harder, networking, self-promotion, and buying more cr@p. 🕴These are now considered ineffective and risky.

Modern treatments focus on the 'fear'/'anxiety'

Specifically, the fear that failure to achieve commonplace but personally meaningless goals means that you will fail to achieve personally meaningful goals. 😱

Practise Head Hygiene

Realise that all the things you feared missing out on are essentially meaningless fads, particularly when seen from a deep global historical perspective.

Remove ill-formed and fashionable ideas of what we should aspire to.

Forget feel-good axioms like 'wanting what's best for our family.'

Forget quasi-religious out-of-context adages, like that vaguely Christian 'love everybody' bulldust.

Apply liberal amounts of history and philosophy. Start with Plato, work through the Renaissance to Colonialism. You can stop at the Nietszche, but it would probably pay to use some postmodernism like Camus.

Scrub till it hurts. 👏Stare into the abyss.

Refresh your senses with some fine art as you realise that nothing matters, but that's okay because you love your pointless pre-determined fate so much that you would do it all over again. Not that you have a choice (Schopenhauer).

Social (Media) Distancing

You are now ready to be extremely critical of online and in-person interactions, perhaps re-framing them yourself. 

Examples:

• You would not (absurdist) want to pay prestigious private school fees for a child you do not have. 🤡
• A worker is exploited and yoked by performance indicators precisely because they are useful (Zhuang Zi).
• Aristotle's views on private property don't say anything about flipping f#cking subdivisions.
• Posts about crushing running app stats would make Stoics eye-roll.

Wear a Mask

Unless you want to be ostracised Athenian-style, or stoned Old Testament style, it is important to conceal your disdain for things you no longer FOMO.

Or not. Who gives a rat's? Not you.

In fact, preliminary studies show that expressing contempt for trivial conventional aspirations may temporarily reduce the infection in both carrier and recipient.

Genuine flippancy to social mores reduces the chance that you will spread social anxiety.

Seek Professional Help

🛋Consult a psychologist or counsellor as to finding the aspirations that really matter to you. That is, what status you really want to be anxious about, or what you really fear missing out on.

© who.int, cdc.gov