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Who Are We When We’re Not Going Out?
Without the aspiration of living our best life all the time, there are harder questions left to answer
Stay home. Avoid large gatherings. Don’t travel. Skip seeing even small groups of friends. As coronavirus spreads around the globe, abiding by these rules has, temporarily at least, made my embarrassingly incessant FOMO disappear.
Like many millennials, my social life has lived online for about as long as I’ve had a social life. And yet suddenly, I no longer have a nagging feeling that I should go out every Friday night or spend every long weekend on a super-special and photogenic getaway. Gone is the worry that I’m wasting a day spent doing nothing in particular. I can pause the self-sabotaging cycle of checking Instagram and wondering how my life stacks up with everyone else’s. Now I’m free from my own toxically high expectations of living my best life all the time. I’m just relieved to be okay and in good health each day that’s true.
Now that social distancing has prohibited IRL hangouts, plenty of extroverts can connect with their friends through a Zoom happy hour. But I suspect there’s a broader collective problem of people not knowing what they like to do or who they are when the Instagram-heightened pressure to go out is removed.
