E-Paper
Unlockdown Diaries: The death of FOMO by Pooja Pande
The lockdown has rendered the Fear Of Missing Out meaningless.
What is the exact opposite of FOMO?
A lockdown.
Not a trick question, that.
In the wake of the pandemic that claimed lives, economies, disrupted healthcare systems globally, uprooted entire populations across the world, leaving the most vulnerable and marginalized completely exposed and betrayed outdoors and the rest of us frightened and shaken and indoors, FOMO has died a quiet, slow death, bereft of purpose, its very core rendered meaningless.
Although some would say it dies only to arise again, it mutates and evolves, much like the virus, because such is the human condition. We are desperate souls at the best of times, searching for value and meaning, attaching purpose to the most random of things. In desperate times then, we adapt even more intensely. The survival instinct kicks in with full force. Even as the ground beneath us shakes and collapses – and it has done that, even literally of late – we pretend that the emails we send (‘Hope this finds you safe’), and the groceries we buy or order (sanitize, rinse, repeat, cook, eat), have real import. We are doing something, we are being useful, we are making the most of it, we do not have FOMO because I see your Dalgona coffee and I raise you my banana bread. With raisins. Topped off with a chia seeds smoothie. I might not, cannot break Instagram but a hashtag gives me relevance.
The Lockdown when it began – in the good old days of late March when we didn’t know it would don four avatars like some demon’s rebirth predicted by an oracle – found me not at home. Or at least, not what has been home for the last decade now. I hence found myself locked out of one end of suburbia and locked in the other end, with a vast geography in the middle fast burning crimson as the red zone. The fact that I’ve always thought of myself as a Dilliwali was one of those facts of my life – identity I would say, because this city lives inside me for better and worse – that found itself being chipped away.
On the other side of Lockdown 4.0 and Unlock 1.0, with my Chief Minister declaring not to confuse it with “freedom” (hah UP, I say. Hah!), I now know that I belong to that acronym known as the NCR. I am a Noida wali. It is not something I have made my peace with entirely. (Refer to aforementioned fact of who my CM is, among other things).
Seeing as I can’t say I care very much for what qualifies as the great outdoors in Gurugram (kaanch ki building, underpasses, dirt roads, microbreweries, salons, BYOB thekas, repeat) it was a good place to be indoors during a lockdown. I missed the trees of my old-world-ish colony in Noida – wild, overgrown – but I did have the 15th floor high-rise view of a few semul trees manicured to perfection. It was fine, I’ll take my trees where and how I can get them, and there was something so almost-purposeful about watching March unravel into hot May and the first sightings of the amaltas even from the chopper view. (It is how our nation’s leaders see trees I would imagine when they go on their aerial inspections, if they notice them, that is).
Because that old friend and foe – Time – definitely seemed to pause, maybe even die and arise anew. Like many of us indoors, I adapted too, slave to the ticking of the clock, the only way we know how to live, in some sense. Carving off the day into chunks of 60-minutes under labels such as Work from Home, Binge-Watch, Read, Exercise, Chores, made sense. And it is important to make sense isn’t it, trying to ramp up these New Normals as we like to call them, when the truth of the matter is there is absolutely nothing normal about the situation we are in. But one could argue even now that there never was anything even remotely, faintly normal about how we once were. It’s just that the quieting of the rush and the din has forced us to address the mess we’ve built and lived in. To realize that we are both implicit and complicit.
These have been slow realizations. The pace of an epiphany, it turns out, aligns with that of the lockdown.
I felt it all in spurts. As I streamed The Walking Dead in a twisted attempt of channelling the fear – how close am I to the apocalypse; as I diligently added weights to my squats routine in an earnest attempt to build strength; as I found myself experiencing the ultimate meditative experience in the unlikeliest of spaces (washing utensils); as the lockdown eases and I fantasize about driving again (oh, to hold that steering wheel and play my music only to be stuck in a traffic jam yet again! Sheer bliss!); as Time went away, taking FOMO along, only to come back.
To say that the fear of missing out is the one about Life, Nature, the planet – that’s what we should fear missing out on. We’re on the precipice.
If I’m admiring the trees and the birds more so now, if I’m finally recognising the injustices that millions of Indians are undergoing, if I’m building an ability to find dhyaan in domesticity, if I’m craving intense workouts and tapping into my core, I only have the lockdown to thank.
As I step out into the domains that once made up a life, my life, I hope I’ll be ready. With the literal mask on my face, and the metaphorical one gone forever.
