How to Battle Your Fear of Missing Out – BtR 140 - a podcast by Brandon Cunningham and Jerry Dugan

A fear of missing out may be one of the underlying issues that make you feel like your life is in a rut. It can also be refined into fuel that drives you to live out your God-given dreams. This article will discuss that feeling and what can be done to overcome it.FOMO Fear of Missing OutFear of being averageIt was the day after Christmas in 2005 when it hit me. I had just spent the entire year paying off all my credit card debt, and it felt great! The problem was that it was now the day after Christmas and all that credit card debt was back. We just had to give our children the best holiday experience ever, right?My kids played with their new toys that morning. My wife was happy they were happy. All I could think about was spending another year paying off that debt, scrimping and scraping together a living for them. There was so much we could not do because of that in the previous year.It was said at that time that about 93% of Americans had one or more credit cards with an average debt of around $5,000 on those credit cards. It may have been higher. I was the average American. I had a mortgage, a car payment, and extra credit card debts. It felt like a crushing weight on my shoulders.On top of that, I was turning 30 in a couple of months and thought long and hard about where my life was going. My outlook on life was that I had to trade my freedom to pay off a recurring debt I didn’t need.A fear of missing out was creeping into my life. I didn’t want to be average. I didn’t want to lose my freedom to travel, find new experiences and meet new people. I would go from war veteran to unnamed, unknown office worker. I was about to shut the door on life in a sense.For my wife, she was driven by a different fear of mediocrity. Average for her meant our children not having anything they wanted. It meant depriving our family of things. Little did she know at the time that she was getting caught up in a game of “Keeping Up with the Joneses.”The comparison of our lives to the lives of others is a great way to insert misery and contempt into your life. It’s best not to play that game at all.The Result of FOMO MarketingThe marketing industry is a powerful one. Almost a quarter of a trillion dollars is spent annually in the United States to drive a machine designed to capture your attention and convince you that you desperately need their products or services.In those expenditures, there is a lot learned about human motivations. The industry has identified our deepest fears and needs. The biggest ones being aging, losing freedom, losing power. You buy their products and you’ll have youth, freedom, happiness, and power.Even our fear of missing out in relationships gets tapped into. I’m thinking about commercials for shaving products. Can’t get a close shave, so no one will want you. Buy our product, you can have a close shave and a beautiful woman will want to touch your face. Problem solved! Sounds like a stretch, right? That’s not why you bought their razor or shaving gel. Deep down though. Those are the emotions that the company was tapping into.Marketing doesn’t even have to

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