FOMO sufferers are trapped in a mindset where friends, colleagues and acquaintances on social media become exemplars of the life they should have had
wice a week, Julia enters the consulting room where I practise psychoanalysis. She has come from work, weary with deadlines, demands and rivalries. During the first few minutes of the session, Julia recounts the previous days’ events in an even tone. But notes of agitation soon creep in – her pitch rises, the rhythms of her speech grow jerky – which presage the mention of Eve.
This is a reference to Eve, who is currently playing Celia in a touring production of the play. By now I know that there’s no point reminding Julia that the prospect of having to travel to obscure corners of the country for weeks on end, performing night after night in shabby theatres to half-full auditoriums, was one of her clearest motives for leaving the profession. Yet she imagines Eve embarked on an impossibly glamorous adventure that is inexorably leading her to bigger and brighter things.
That clarity of thought dissolved as soon as these abstractions were placed in the context of her own life. Stability became a life sentence to mediocrity and dullness. She yearned for the thrilling unpredictability of Eve’s life, the sense that fame and romance, even if not likely, were possible.is the expression of roiling discontent with yourself, a conviction that if my life was really that good, it wouldn’t be mine. It is the compulsion to locate value beyond one’s own experience.
Infancy and childhood initiate us into a permanent state of dissatisfaction. Our cries for milk or a comforting hug habituate a reflex to demand things, which will become ever more elaborate and sophisticated. Infantile appeals for nourishment and affection graduate to pestering for Pokémon cards and video games. Desire and rivalry become a basic fact of daily life.
In the chapters on marriage, Rasselas’s sister Nekayah expounds on the difficulties with the various options. Early marriages are born of the pain of being apart. But once a young couple wed, their best selves quickly dissolve and, in their mutual disappointment, “they wear their life out with altercations”.
The problem, as the novel unsparingly reveals, is that reality always triumphs over romantic adventure. Initially Emma sees her lover Léon glow with otherworldly perfection, before hearing him utter the “lukewarm sentiments” that muddy everyday life. With merciless perspicacity, Flaubert shows us that Emma’s fantasies are above all a wish for transcendence: a longing to rise above the shabby motives and petty self-interest of the world around her.
We are all missing out, all the time, simply by virtue of the constraints of time and space, and having just one, finite life
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