The Joy of Missing Out by Svend Brinkmann review – forget Fomo

Don’t let the fear of missing out ruin your life. Count your blessings and be there for other people – but beware the ‘elitist trap’

In our time, “personal growth” is the corporate-approved dream. As the Danish psychologist Svend Brinkmann notes, it is a “rampant development culture that knows no boundaries”. Personal growth must be thought of as literally endless in order to feed the market for training and self-discovery. But just how huge does one person need to be? Infinite personal growth is no more sustainable than infinite economic growth. And so this smart little pamphlet is, in a way, a manifesto for personal degrowth, or shrinkage.

Fear of missing out, or Fomo, is wrecking our lives, Brinkmann argues, so we should cultivate the pleasure of disengagement. He cites Aristotle’s rule of moderation in all things, research indicating that too much choice is psychologically toxic, and the idea of the “hedonic treadmill”, according to which we very quickly adapt to nice things and still end up wanting more.

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from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2Su3ZZ6

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