If information is important, it will find you

A simple concept to cure any digital FOMO you might have in modern times

Lots of people live with not just financial or social event FOMO (fear of missing out, you know this) but perhaps the most pernicious in modern times is information/news FOMO. This manifests as thinking you need to stay at the very latest of your sector, read every email from your company straight away, or follow the absolute newest updates on social, all the time. Of course, all FOMO is indicative of an immature mind. For financial comparing yourself to others is a recipe for anxiety and depression (you should only ever compare to yourself yesterday). For missing out on parties, I mean get over your fear and go out to the party. But information FOMO permeates across work, personal and social categories. It’s also one you should let go of.

I blame 24/7 cable news for boomers and millennials, and stream-based platforms for younger cohorts conditioning everyone this way and exploiting our evolutionary need to understand our environment. It’s true, for millions of years we needed to understand threats in our immediate physical space in order to survive. Animals in the wild still do. So do you, but now not everything is a threat to your immediate survival (lions probably aren’t chasing you). So you must stop letting the world exploit your nervous system in this way.

There’s good news here: our modern systems are actually very well trained to give you the immediate information you need, when you need it, without you needing to do anything (or live with fear you’re missing out). If there’s something like a severe thunderstorm in your area, your phone will alert you to it. If something important enough is happening in your industry, and you subscribe to a sampling of writers in your sector already, at least one of them will write on it — probably multiple. If a new tool is all that good, one of your peers will link it to you. If a parent or close friend passed on, you’ll get a phone call. If there’s an accident while driving somewhere, your phone or GPS will alert you to a faster route. If you owe a credit card payment, the bank will send you an email. My point being that you don’t need to chase down the most important information in your life, it will, in nearly all cases, come to you. In some cases, since we live in a networked world, you’ll even be the one helping pass it on.

There is probably no single social media post, news story, YouTube video, email or anything else that is so life-changing or critically important you need it right now. And, we have subscription tools so you don’t miss important things from the important creators in your life. The internet and world is now best time-shifted. You can even enjoy TV programs or movies on your own schedule. So anything not hyper-critical, you should take in at your own pace, not with the frenetic fear of a caveman being chased by a bear. Everything can be amazing and you can be happy, if you re-prioritize.

Some people are losing their minds about generative AI content here ‘ruining’ their (hate to break it but never was) ‘perfect’ information feeds but none of that worries me. For a few reasons I listed here, but for the purposes of this post, the internet has already been infinite for some time, and the feeds of news presented to you, while frequently interesting and insightful, were never life or death. And with that, for all intents and purposes they already contain infinite spam. Adding a new kind of spam to the mix doesn’t really matter at this point, we’ll sort it out like we do already. No flavor of spam will stop you from receiving the legitimately important information in your life.

Related to this concept, my friend Seth Godin wrote previously on the concept of ‘the high cost of now.’ It’s just as relevant now as when he published it:

More than ever, there’s a clear relationship between how new something is and how much it costs to discover that news.

You can check your email twice a day pretty easily. Once every fifteen minutes has a disruption cost. Pinging it with your pocketphone every sixty seconds is an extremely expensive lifestyle/productivity choice.

Sure, go ahead, stay hyper-current, but realize it’s not free.

…the interesting questions:

Are you getting what you’re paying for in your quest for now?

Is it worth it?

Sometimes, in our quest for the new, we overpay. Most of the time, moving down the curve will decrease your costs dramatically, without hurting your ability to make smart decisions. Alternatively, when you choose to spend the time (or money), leverage it like crazy.

I bet you are overspending on now. Not everywhere, just in the wrong areas. Worth an audit, probably.

I see all of this as a personal triage problem. And once you start to value your life and time appropriately, viewing things through this lens should quickly help you sort out what’s important, and when. Taken together with the realization that the important information will assuredly find you, you can live like a calm, enlightened monk walking through a sea of chaos, unbothered.

So drop the FOMO, put down social and read a book or hike on the weekends device-free. Spend time on deep work without feeling a need to join every meeting at your company. Delete all your emails without fear and refresh your inbox down to zero (I’ve never had a problem here, just save important docs, and anyway key things like tax forms can always be resent). Your industry, peers or alerts ultimately will surface the critical news external of to-do lists. Just don’t worry about them, it will all come to you in time, and if you’re not something like a day trader or air traffic controller your life will be precisely the same no matter when you get it. And if something doesn’t find you? It was likely never that important to begin with.