Dare to Disappear

We are going through a time where almost everyone is a celebrity, either publicly acclaimed or self-acclaimed. Decades ago, while listening to one of the popular public figures, I learned that one of the many things these celebrities miss is a personal space of their own. Once anyone becomes a public figure, it becomes challenging to live a conventional life. Anytime a celebrity is seen in a public place, they get swamped by paparazzi. People consider themselves entitled to know everything that happens in the life of these popular figures. I guess, when it comes to curiosity, many of us are unfathomably interested in knowing what is going on in everyone’s life irrespective of who they are, whether we know them or not. Remarkably, such people have no idea what to do with this huge volume of data that they keep on collecting about others from both authentic and unauthentic sources. Considering these data files have little or no significance in improving an individual’s quality of life, they can be considered as junk files which are gathered tirelessly and addictively.

              Not sure whether lack of privacy is still considered as a drawback in the present age of social networking. People volunteer to be their own paparazzi. Thousands and thousands of people every day turn on their camera and record everything that they do from the time they wake up till they go to bed. They upload such recordings on social sites so that everyone, mostly strangers, can sneak peek into their daily life through those recordings. The total number of views of such posts define the order of success.

              One of the most popular acronyms of the 21st century is FOMO that stands for “Fear Of Missing Out”. FOMO is a worried feeling of missing out something that others are going to enjoy, specifically caused by things that we see on social media. As a response to such FOMO, many of us compulsively keep browsing through the social media to an extend that perturbs both our physical as well as mental well-being. In life we cannot get a hold of everything. Life can be compared to one of those buffets where we cannot take everything on our plate to eat. The variety of foods that get offered to us by the buffet of life is way larger than either the size of our plate or our appetite. Therefore, we need to pick the food thoughtfully to our plate. No matter how much we try we will always miss out on something. Then given a choice it’s better to miss the things that cater less to our wellbeing. Then we can convert our FOMO to JOMO which is “Joy of Missing Out”. It’s okay to occasionally disappear from the constant attention of camera and people, to find time for ourselves, to spend time with ourselves, to reflect on our thoughts and to reconnect with our own selves. Often such occasional disappearance helps us to transform our lives, pretty much like those seeds who disappear under the soil only to come back as a full-fledged plant.

-          Soma Banerjee