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Available for over a year

If you’re anxious you didn’t bag a deal on “Black Friday”, there is a bit more time. The retailers aren’t now calling it Black Friday weekend (or even week!) for nothing. And there’s Cyber Monday to come, of course. But “Hurry!”, as the adverts urge. “It’s unmissable!” While consumer watchdogs have found that most of the current offers aren’t financially worth worrying too much about - nevertheless: there’s still a powerful psychological pull when it comes, in particular, to “FOMO”: our fear of missing out. In a sense, how else can you explain crowds fighting over TVs as if their lives depended on it? And FOMO is not pleasant. One report says that three-quarters of young adults experience what’s described as “The uneasy and sometimes all-consuming feeling that your peers are doing, or are in possession of more, or something better, than you”. We compare ourselves endlessly with others, it seems, and find ourselves wanting. One psychological antidote is to cultivate appreciation for what we already have, as the Polish psychologist, Andrew Bienkowski, points out. As a boy, he and his family lost everything when they were exiled to Siberia, but he developed a mantra which he believes helped to keep him well ever since. It went: “I have life. I have breath, I have shelter, I am here.” And if we can afford to take anything for granted, he says, then we’re probably blessed beyond our needs, anyway. Start a list of simple things we might take for granted, and it can be wonderfully hard to stop - family, friends, the laugh of a child, the sight of a full-moon rising... This complements an underlying spiritual notion that we already have access to the treasure we’ve been restlessly searching for; the reason so many of us can’t see the X that marks the spot is because we were standing on it, all along. For me as a Christian, that means remembering that God is not some depletable resource out there to fight over, but an abundant, overflowing gift of presence, to receive, here, now, from within. All of which matters, I think, not just because we don’t have to let culture play to our fear of missing out, but because such fear will never be assuaged, by definition, through a brand of consumerism that builds in obsolescence anyway. It’s unsustainable - for us, and the Earth. Perhaps we could cultivate a Joy of Missing Out, instead. As Jesus said: “What does it profit [anyone] to gain the whole world but lose their soul?” And what if the world were never ours to gain, anyway - but a place where the treasure is shared.