FOMO FRIDAY: Cabin Trip & Snowboarding in Tahoe
Today I'm launching a new semi-regular feature on the blog, similar to my Monday Movie Review posts: FOMO Friday. Partly, these posts are designed to overcome a common obstacle of blogging everyday: when the weekend rolls around I want to be out doing stuff, not inside blogging about it. I often fall behind on the blog over weekends.
It's exactly that feeling I'm trying to capture with these posts: the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) nearly every urban, socially-networked twenty-something suffers from. As it's been explained to me, FOMO is the fear that you're not eating at the trendiest restaurants, not going on the most outdoor adventures, haven't downloaded the latest app, haven't heard the hottest indie band. Forbes even provides the example that "someone could be fearful of going to the hottest restaurant and ordering the wrong thing."
Really, it's a constant, gnawing anxiety that you're not consuming enough of life.
I have a suspicion that once you get hitched and have kids, FOMO kind of goes away on its own, like a bad rash. When you lose that favored place at the center of your own life, missing out must not be as big a deal. Suddenly it's about feeding, clothing, loving, burping, wiping, and reading to a damp squirmy thing. You've already missed out, and you're now about pouring yourself into someone else – so they get the most out of life.
Until then, treating FOMO requires almost constant application of new experiences.
Since moving back to the Bay Area, I've been crazy about missing out on a Northern California winter ritual: driving up to Tahoe to go skiing. (Or snowboarding. All my friends snowboard, so if I were on skis, I'd be afraid of missing out on the single-plank experience.) Last weekend we went up to Reed's cabin on the West Shore and rode two days at Squaw.
It was my fourth time ever on a snowboard, and by the end of the second day I was going up to the summit with Agent Coulson, carving down blue runs, nearly running over a squad of five-year-old ski schoolers, and enjoying a well-earned après-ski with the whole gang, over Lagunitas and Irish coffees.
Then we went back to Reed's, took pictures of the alpine glow, made ourselves a tasty pot of pasta for dinner, emptied a few bottles of wine, and played Cards Against Humanity until late turned into early.
Look for more FOMO Friday posts, which should be heavy on pictures and light on text, because I'll be out having fun and too busy to chronicle it all in prose.
