The Joy of Missing Out

Meera is 40 years old, working as an IT consultant and a mother of 2. She has a digital profile on practically every social media platform. On a Tuesday afternoon, as she reaches out to her phone after an hour-long meeting, an insta feed tells her that one of her friends celebrated her 40^th birthday at the best restaurant in town. Meera sighs, ‘this afternoon meeting robbed away a sumptuous lunch’. Nevertheless, another notification on Facebook arrives to show her cousin playing in the snow, with beautiful Swiss Alps covering the background. ‘How lucky she is’, thinks Meera as her left thumb continues to scroll. One of her colleagues just completed a PhD, another ex-colleague got promoted, someone else posted a new job announcement- less than 5 minutes of mindless scrolling is enough to make Meera feel inadequate and ashamed of her own self.

What Meera experiences is what most people do, these days. It’s one of the perils of living in a hyper-connected world. Fear of Missing Out, or FOMO as we better know it, is an obsessive, compulsive disorder (OCD) that stems from comparison, guilt and jealousy. While FOMO has been around since ages, possibly since humans started thinking, the term itself is very recent. Social media has democratized the boundary-less virtual world, bestowing unlimited broadcasting rights to anyone with a phone in the hand. Amplifying every achievement, making every experience look superlative and showing it off is enough to promote narcissism in self and FOMO in others. It all ends up in painting the grass greener on the other side, making others’ lives appear much better than ours.

Comparison with others is a primal instinct, conditioned through millions of years of evolution. As in humans, so does in many other living beings, measuring oneself against and rising above others has been an innate need for survival, reproduction and occupying influential place in social hierarchy. Hyper-consumption of digital content has aggravated this further in recent times. Where one’s online worth is evaluated on external validations (likes, shares and followers), portraying the best version of oneself to remain likeable on social media is no less than a survival instinct. Relative positioning matters more than absolute success.

FOMO creates a void, an urge to chase every opportunity to gratify oneself with. This results in mental burnouts, anxiety & insecurity. Narcissism and a hunger for appreciation, even in physical life, is observed to be on the rise. Decisions are impulsive, driven by FOMO than by wisdom, actions are influenced more by show-off than inspiration.

An alternate philosophy is emerging as a response to the growing FOMO. Joy of Missing Out, JOMO as it is called, is the freedom of being in our own skin and expressing ourselves in our own comfortable ways. Those embracing JOMO consciously emancipate from being the puppets of social and self-induced stigma. They set their own dimensions of fulfilment and refrain from measuring their happiness on others’ scale. Allowing themselves to discover and master their own craft at a comfortable pace, they are in no rush to prove their worth to others. They refuse to make choices dictated by peer or social pressures and stop being square pegs in round holes.

While FOMO is more outward and compels on following others, JOMO is about turning inward and following our own instincts. FOMO induces stress, harbours unrealistic expectations from our own selves. JOMO begets peace, offers opportunities to appreciate our natural self. FOMO feeds on external validation, while JOMO breeds self-satisfaction. FOMO is a mindless chase of never-ending materialistic pleasures, while JOMO is mindful pursuit of contentment and spiritual elevation.

In his book named ‘The Psychology of Money’, Morgan Housel explains how natural endowments influence success in particular fields, while advantage in one field might as well be a disadvantage in another. Michael Phelps is blessed with a long torso, short legs, large feet and wide wingspan that makes him a better swimmer. Compare him with Hicham El Guerrouj, a Moroccan middle-distance runner, having legs longer than the torso. If Phelps’ achievements in swimming fuel FOMO in Guerrouj, the latter might only displease himself further by never even nearing Phelps’ achievements with longer legs. Same will hold true for Phelps in running.

Natural limitations can restrict social imitation. Human world offers lot of opportunities to allow multiple talents, arts and preferences to co-exist and flourish simultaneously. It's essential to discover our own, and be loyal to it.

What will stay human in the age of AI

Last two and a half decades have seen phenomenal development in technology at an unprecedented pace. We can’t imagine a life without internet and phone today. Gen Z and Gen Alpha are amazed on how older generations survived without these.

At start of 21^st century, Google democratized internet and brought all the public knowledge available online, to our disposal. Apple ensured every hand had a phone, thus getting this information at our fingertips, literally. Facebook ushered in new ways of connecting and interacting with people. Social media encouraged everyone to broadcast photos, content and opinions. Digital revolution invaded our lives faster than we could even realize.

These days, AI in general and Chat GPT in particular is busy capturing our mind-space. It’s not just the awe of a superlative technology, but also the fear of losing professional jobs that inspires and worries people at the same time. Will AI cannibalize our jobs? What will we do if machines do everything? Will machines become our new masters? Are the days numbered for human art? Are we missing the bus? Our worries and queries have no end.

To get our answers, it is essential we understand what AI actually is. In simple terms, AI is a collective reference to computing algorithms which learn patterns from historic data, and predict the outcome of a future (unseen) data by matching it to a pattern it has already learnt. GPT-3, which belongs to the “Generative AI” family and powers ChatGPT, is an AI model that is said to be trained on the entire information that was available on internet till June 2021. It is a language model, meaning it is trained on predicting the next word, e.g. for “Twinkle twinkle little “, the next most probable word (out of thousands of other English words) is “star” and that’s what it will predict based on its learning.

The current AI makes machines smart enough to perform mundane, laborious and repetitive jobs, or at least that is what they are being considered for at this moment. Digital vulnerabilities like biased and influenced results, limited abilities to filter out fake content, knowledge limited to training data source, regulatory issues, etc. still keep many away from embracing AI completely.

So, do we really need to worry about AI eating our jobs?

In his book “The Atomic Habits”, James Clear mentions that humans overestimate the situations in near future where chances of occurrence are minimal (like the flight you travel in being highjacked) and underestimate the vulnerabilities that are far ahead in time, but sure to occur (like obesity due to unhealthy lifestyle).

Fear of losing jobs due to AI is like fearing of being hijacked. In the last 300 years, every major revolution has seen such discussions soaring in, machines cutting hands in Industrial Revolution, Computers killing jobs in Digital revolution, etc. There was a hue and cry about Amazon, Walmart and the likes cannibalizing the General Stores we find in every corner of street. However, the fact remains that shops, both online and in brick and mortar, can coexist and flourish together. Invasion of Robotics in manufacturing began 3 decades ago, however there is no record of major job cuts in the sector globally.

With AI, the mundane repetitive jobs are sure to get transferred from humans to machines. At the same time, humungous data generated every second allows opportunities for more data exploration and analysis, thus increasing the breadth of its application, hence more jobs. Thoughtful application of AI will only relieve humans from the monotony of unproductive jobs and allow time to focus on more interesting and productive things.

Computer code generated by “Co-Pilot” (Gen-AI that generates application code) is too generic to fit directly in a heavily customized solution. We will still need software engineers to translate the generic to specific. Again, Gen AI serves as the Co-Pilot (NOT an auto-pilot) to the software developer, thus allowing the latter to focus more on logic than syntax.

AI models use Neural Networks to learn patterns and encode this information in the form of numbers. Capabilities are limited to the corpus that they are trained on, hence anything beyond that is out-of-scope. They have knowledge, but lack wisdom. That said, such models are found to be less effective on scenarios that deal with unknowns.

Consider situations like Covid. Everyone was dealing with “unknown” unknowns. Neither was any data available to train models, nor did the “pattern” match with anything already learnt. Dealing such unknowns requires human judgement developed out of varied experiences, collective knowledge, emotions, empathy, social awareness, study of cultural influences and social behaviour, local laws, hunches and a lot more factors. These may not translate entirely into measurable dimensions that a model can learn from. All such work will always stay human, where AI can be an obedient and efficient assistant.

In near future, machines might automate creation of medical transcripts by capturing details from conversations between a doctor and patient. It might create marketing content with impressive narration and images. It has already started writing articles and creating professional presentations. It has also begun answering customers’ calls, chat messages and playing the translator. It’s driving cars. It suggests machine failures and also fuels our OTT indulgence by suggesting content.

All such jobs are sure to get rid of humans. But ideation, anything that requires empathy (consulting, counselling, therapy), human judgement (disease diagnosis, legal judgements, policy making) will and should always remain human. Emotional quotient is proven to be a major determinant in professional success, which, thankfully hasn’t yet been drummed into the machines. We will need humans to motivate us, not machines.

AI is like electricity; it has potential that can only be harnessed through smart application. Applying AI to where it adds value will also remain a human thing.

I feel certain things should consciously remain human. Art should emerge from human mind. Fun of creation should stay human. We shouldn’t let AI rob from us our choices, ability to think and thrill of discovery.

While embracing AI, we should also be concerned about the latter part explained by James Clear – “Humans underestimate the vulnerabilities that are far ahead in time, but sure to occur”. AI can be a great servant but a terrible master. Controlled and ethical use of AI can make it a great servant, while its overuse may handicap us forever.

With every major revolution emerges an inherent evolution that is relatively slow, silent, but which creates an impact over time. Our conscious choices can steer this evolution towards a better world.