(NOTE: The Layman Pascal Substack embeds philosophical insights, sociological speculations & esoteric practices within zesty idiosyncratic and often autobiographical stories. Although this project serves the overlapping “liminal” communities who are loosely united in a developmental, integrative and regenerative response to the planetary Metacrisis, it is also broadly relevant to all persons interested in cultural restoration & personal depth. The main articles are free but there are additional materials, audio versions & early acess for paying subscribers. For this particular article, there is an additional “rant” called Chef Stable that will be available soon but ONLY to special paying subscribers! And the reason I reiterate that is to highlight the possible feeling of “missing out” which is especially appropriate for this essay. Wink.)
I. AN INTRODUCTION
This essay is all about what you miss out on. Remember when you did not see me in that dress? Too bad. Or is it? How ought we to feel about missing things? What is the productive human response to absence and incomplete access?
These are universal feelings. A child frets because she cannot choose every flavor of ice cream. Adults are haunted by lost people. Sensitive visionaries suffer from the other pathways History could have taken. Our hearts are in contact with counterfactuals. Even very stoic and well-adjusted people subliminally cringe about every little sign that we are being left out, deprived or disconnected.
In Neal Stephenson’s classic novel Anathem it is postulated that our very consciousness is a phenomenon that straddles the multiverse, attempting to harvest the alternative outcomes of our parallel selves. Regardless of your opinion about multiple universes, it seems that the speculative awareness of the untaken paths is a deep feature of how human intelligence works. Quantum mechanics and the science of Statistics constantly reveal how much the actual events are dependent on a comparison across many possible events. If our fate largely rests on the behavior of “what else might happen” then it is no wonder that we evolved to be very sensitive about what we miss out on.
It is everywhere in human life and it is amplified by the historical circumstances of technosocial hypermodernity (i.e. living nowish). It has become simply impossible to access, decipher or even hear about most of the “content.” Every hour, we upload more video to the internet than anyone could watch in their lifetime. Automated quasi-intelligences are now endlessly creating the majority of the speech in the world. Culture has gotten away from us. Where are the real Epstein files? The UAP evidence? The secrets hidden behind Non-Disclosure Agreements? There is no possible way that you can get on top of it or discover all the relevant information on any topic. It is all there but it might as well be missing.
At the same time that we are increasingly aware of how much “other stuff” is absent, we are also developing an ever greater appetite that demands to access all of it. People born native to the wireless internet expect constant and full-spectrum streaming access to every kind of content. Progressive parents aspire to meet every need and discuss every topic that a child brings up. Resurgent polyamory. International parcel shipping on demand. The aspiration to bring all voices into the discussion. There is a pervasive background sense that we ought to have access to “everything everywhere all at once.” And this heightens the pain of knowing how much we do NOT get to access. Surely some of the reason that people are starting to believe in the great Simulation Hypothesis is because our experience of reality itself seems to be missing something.
HBO’s The Leftovers, Damon Lindelof’s extended meditation on inexplicable absence, might have been prophetic.
There are so many pleasures, pathways, data points & important possibilities to which you will never get access. And countless more to which your access will always be incomplete and vaguely unsatisfying. Alternatives, gaps, griefs & occlusions are everywhere. Our hearts are haunted by god-shaped holes. Perhaps early life trauma, or some unprovided form of support, has sent us down an insufficient pathway. Where did our missing loved ones and potential loved ones go? Where did the natural, normal and meaningful World disappear into?
For all these reasons, the term FOMO has become a standard cultural trope.
This fear of missing out is actually a very privileged pang. We all feel it but it requires a certain subtlety and entitlement to notice it. This term circulates most in communities that have many fascinating events, speakers, treasures, transformative practices, diverse entertainments, and intriguing individuals. You cannot sample all the delights. You cannot stay up to date on all the shows. You cannot order everything off the trendy menu. FOMO.
Interestingly though, some folks seem to barely feel these pangs. Perhaps they have a different in-born temperament. Or they might be forcing themselves idealistically to assert gratitude and acceptance as a desperate attempt to never feel their own bedevilment by loss and alternative possibilities. Possibly they have some interesting “inner strategy” for converting the fearful quality of missing out into a strength and satisfaction of some kind.
That last option is the point of this whole article.
How do we begin to encounter non-access, asymmetry, distance, difference, absence, and non-inclusion as a meaningful source of empowerment and rejoicing? What follows will be a exploration of multiple doorways into this problem. But first let me begin with a personal story…
II. A FREE SET OF STEAK KNIVES
I was an odd kid in secondary school. Are you shocked?
Not lonely, aggrieved or nerdish. Good at sports. Friendly. Funny. Well-liked. Pretty chill. Sure. I was not “odd” in the standard way that a character is presented as peculiar on American sitcoms about school life. Instead, I was oddly odd.
For example, in the 11th grade, I helped another boy create a surrealistic group called “The Sombrero Man Fan Club.” You could sign up via two different cohorts. Either the Gillian cohort or the Alan Thicke cohort. Gilligan was the main character of the old sitcom Gilligan’s Island and Alan Thicke was a goofy Canadian actor (and the father of the singer Robin Thicke whose song Blurred Lines was parodied by Weird Al in an entertaining screed about English grammar crimes).
We signed people up and gave out membership badges. These were post-it notes reading, “Kill me,” that were signed with the cryptic initials S. M. That stood for our fictitious mascot Sombrero Man. But how could the school administration have known that fact?
The next morning I was aggressively yanked out of my Honors Math class to get screamed at in the hallway by a livid, purple-faced Vice Principal. Apparently they were legally required to assume that a suicidal Grade 9 student (presumably with the initials S.M.) was crying out for help! Upon discovering the truth, they were not comforted.
Instead, all their moral concern and social anxiety curdled and was poured upon your humble narrator. In hindsight I am glad that he was so enraged. It gave me a few minutes to remove some of the strange garb I was wearing. Multiple hats. Colorful scarves. A name tag indicating that I was “Chuck” from the McCallum Motors Volvo dealership. That’s where my dad bought the family car. And by the time the Vice Principal had calmed down enough to actually see me, standing in front of him, I looked plausibly normal. Just a regular kid with an innocently shapeless bundle of unspecified stuff shoved under his arm.
The threat of expulsion was raised but, taking my academic and dispositional qualities into account, he settled on forbidding me to EVER distribute or post anything in the school — without the explicit permission of the administration. An odd moment for an odd kid.
It was followed by an even odder moment. Without thinking much about what I was doing, I immediately entered student politics. Student Council elections were underway. I got on the list. Got elected. By the end of the week I was appointed as a member of the Special Executive Board of the Student Council for the following school year. My job? I was assigned to be the so-called Publicity Director. In other words, next year, it was my explicit (administration-directed) task to distribute and post things ALL OVER THE SCHOOL.
When September rolled around, I undertook my first act as the surrealist “Joseph Goebbels” in charge of marketing and public communication for Parklands Senior Secondary High School. And I was eager to do my job.
A few days before school opened, I went in. Confident. I began re-arranging the messages on the large display board in the main hall. Getting the balances correct was essential. I had to actually accomplish the minimum functions of the role so that I could justify my delightful flourishes. The giant sign now, and encouragingly, welcomed everyone to the New School Year. Especially the youngest students who were just going into 9th grade. The sign wished them well. It also instructed them to “get your free set of steak knives at the office.”
This would set the tone for the whole year.
Mine was not the graffiti of a rebellious anarchist punk. It did not denounce the system. There were no profanities, threats or drug advocacy. Simply a message, and a motive, that haunted the ambiguous edges of conventional sensemaking.
That year people had to periodically wonder why posters for the school dances were printed on paper lunch bags that were stapled to the ceiling. (This is all true.) I was either radically bored or feeling the first oncoming tentacles of “a true calling.” Why was H.P. Lovecraft’s trans-dimensional Cthulhu monster so often mentioned in official end-of-day announcements read over the Public Address system? For what possible reason did the official transcript of Student Council budget meetings include a vote on whether or not to send money to the clearly non-existent, bizarrely sheep-obsessed, and hot air balloon-using New Zealand rebel group known as “The Brothers of the New Moon?”
And what — dear ancestors — was the deal with The Badger Toss???
I have not yet mentioned that I also, at this time, became Senior Editor of the Yearbook. It was overseen by a jolly, dope-smoking Chemistry teacher who seemed to like me and had a very hands-off attitude. This allowed me to do a very interesting thing:
As PR director of the Student Council I could, repeatedly and officially, announce the upcoming date of a fictitious event. The Annual Badger Toss. A wondrous day in which students of all ages tossed living Badgers around in service to local charities. Of course this preposterous event, highly publicized in advance, never occurred. Yet, as head of the Yearbook, I dedicated two whole pages for remembering this hallowed occasion. Pictures. Write-ups. Testimonials. Even today there may be former students, armed with vague memories and faded yearbooks, who truly believe that they missed out on this unique and fantastic day of unparalleled school spirit.
Why am I telling you this? Consider it my resume. It proves that I have been thinking for a long time about the curious dynamics of formal absence and the experience of “missing out.” What is it? What are its variations? And how do we assimilate it as a positive quality?
I discussed this with the inimitable Turquoise Sound at a cabin in Northern Ontario around a plate of delicious steaks (thank you Eric). The phrase JOMO came up. Joy of missing out. It delighted me. The Goddess JOMO. In her service, it appeared that there might be a little switch in our hearts that could experience the same pattern, the same gap, in at least two different ways — as displeasure or pleasure.
Are those dogs barking at you angrily or heralding the passage of your magnificent presence? Are you being singled out as a scapegoat… or as a potential star? A small shift of context and the same sensations, the same structure, could have the opposite valence. Every evaluation has two ends.
I have a good friend who plays with his lingering childhood feeling of being excluded from fun adventures, close conversations and relational intimacy. When it flares up, he simply names it and lets it go. Good practice. But to me there is something more to it. I see him honoring the very qualities whose distance pains him. And I wonder if it is possible for him to experience the same pathos from its other side.
How do you know you are feeling the angst of not being included? Is it not possible that you are misperceiving the intensity of your reverence? Can the same contrast be felt with an unforced opposite meaning?
You have probably heard me quote Nietzsche saying that, “He who despises himself still honors himself as one who despises.” That means that low value experiences are still connected to the valuable condition of being an evaluator. To hate something requires that you can determine its distance from Valuableness which means, of course, that you are in contact with Valuableness Itself. Hallellujah. So the feeling of being excluded is also your own contemplation of your own understanding of the worth of inclusion. How far can that sort of idea go? How much better could we get at feeling the positive significance of absence and the profound value that is implicit to low value?
This, friends, is what I had in mind when I started this article.
A kind of nondualistic Nietzscheanism probing for psychotechnologies that could validly experience “distance from value” as being “highly valuable.” But while I was pondering and preparing, I noticed a small kerfuffle of guff online. That’s my new favorite phrase. A kerfuffle of guff.
My social media settings revealed that some folks were responding strongly to a set of sexually-themed Substack articles from Alyssa Allegreti. I knew Alyssa from an interview about her philosophy of domestic work — in which I called her the “metamodern Marie Condo.” Her transparency, complexity, and sensitive attunement to the ultimately unresolved dialectics of daily living was admirable. It seemed quite natural to me that she would extend this work through a series of confessional online writings exploring the dubious mess of conscious sexual and interpersonal developmental work.
And I thought:
What brings up the edges of “missing out,” both positively and negatively, more than sexuality? A few things, sure, but sexuality is definitely in the Top Ten.
So I resolved to modify my JOMO article to include a kind of Substack meta-commentary on Alyssa’s very explicit writings. It would be, I thought, the literary equivalent of a Tik Tok or Youtube reaction video (such as was parodied so well by Bo Burnham in Inside). My article would be a commentary about the contents of her articles. I even went as far as to record a series of short audio podcast interviews with her about the philosophical implications of her anthropological Wallflower At A Sex Party series.
It was all going according to plan. Until… she suddenly messaged me. She was removing her articles and would I be kind enough to un-post the recordings? Certainly. You are now missing out on those.
Here is her retraction statement.
Honoring her wishes, I will present a very truncated version of my meta-commentary with only a few innocent quotes from her work.
III. AN ORGY OF THE MIND
I am resolved to be a voyeur; a sex party cultural anthropologist, her series began. Not bad for an opening line. Personally I never attended an orgy. I even successfully sidestepped the various “threesomes” that came anywhere near me. For good or ill (and with due deference to the Aubrey Marcuses of the world), it has come to seem to me that the particular quality of transmuted sexual energy that is most promising requires an intensely personal chamber of intimacy with a specially committed partner.
This is a not a general rule. I am very supportive of people who are drawn to explore more impersonal, public or group experiments in the therapeutic, pleasurable, indulgent or self-discovery play of sexuality. Recently I talked with Elegance Block (formerly Dakota Quackenbush) about her complex, trauma-informed, developmentalist lens on her own journey into-and-beyond polyamory and I found a lot of resonance with the complex support and critique in her views. You can check our her short article here.
So it was with many subtle mixed feels that I read Alyssa’s series on her Adaptive Daydream substack. The autobiographical tale of a (“so fucking Asheville”) sex party that she attended following the heartbreaking end of an intimate relationship. It was described with a kind of erotic & neurotic detail that did not please all of her Household Goddess followers.
What immediately stood out to me was that this was a tale of the Missing. A lost relationship. Energies previously engaged and now mourning, circulating, searching. A search passing into a scene that most of us miss out on (often by choice). Sex parties, orgies, throuples, swingers. A realm that consists of many alternative experiences that may be wonderful, or terrible, or terribly ordinary, but which cannot be ultimately and fully explored by anyone. Constant exposure to paths not taken.
And, heck, I thought, in my hillbilly drawl, is not sex largely about missing out anyway?
Think about how we become sexual beings in the first place. The general potential of erotic energy is dramatically narrowed by the time we encounter it in ourselves. Sigmund Freud spoke of the journey of our polymorphous perversity to become functionally anchored in the body’s capacity for responsible reproductive pleasures. The amorphous omnidirectional plenitude of potentials is whittled away just like a child’s many neural pathways are slowly specialized into an adult consciousness.
Dr. Timothy Leary talked about the way that pre-conscious neurological imprints teach our brains to concentrate its desiring toward particular types of people. Most of us only get sexually entangled with a very small subset of one gender from one (or a small number) of ethnic backgrounds. By the time we are conscious of “getting turned on by someone,” we have already had most of the possible arousals removed from our system. A few witches and weirdos retain a slightly larger aperture but the basic dialectic is pretty ubiquitous.
In Eros, as in everything else, there is massive asymmetry between the absent possibles and the available actuals. This is not problematic in principle. Evolution, meaning, pleasure and capacity are as much about constraint as they are about novelty. Every actual increase of meaning seems to involve more discernment, refinement — constraint. But the FOMO of sexuality goes even further.
Most sexual education is insufficient or comes too late. The majority of us (I have been assured) look back at initial sexual relationships which could charitably described as “learning experiences” but which might equally well be called mistakes or traumas.
On surveys, people routinely report feeling that they do not have sex often enough, well enough or with a great enough variety of partners. They are bedeviled by questions like, “Have I tried all the things? Where did the magic go? Am I every fully present during the act? Am I living my real sexual identity?” All this stuff makes sex parties such an excellent theme for exploring the FOMO to JOMO pipeline.
ESOTERIC TIP
A lot of FOMO is anchored in an insufficient relationship to our bodies. When physical energy is unused, or somatic information goes undetected, our psyche tends to seek elsewhere for this missing stimulation. Maybe it exists down that pathway? Or that other one? Instead of inhabiting this person deeply, I pursue a vague sense of absent “realness” while viewing my own body through a “self-image” or a “social story.” Digital devices bring forward an endless torrent of glamorous and tortured Other bodies in distant places. Celebrities, protestors, athletes, victims, etc. Polarized factions. People degrading, improving and transforming the world. How do we relate to all these people and worlds and ideas? How do you look in comparison to them? Should you be involved in their issues? And sometimes: How do I get uninvolved and put down this damned device and find real people? There is a constant questing toward the fantasized places of excitement and authentic engagement but how much of that is driven by the displacement of the inner experience of the body? Missing data about this moment of embodied living re-presents itself as a compulsive interest in the energy of distant bodies and the alluring fantasy of a “more real” experience somewhere else. The nervous system seeks its missing stimulation by searching through mentally mediated social information. Much of this pattern falls away as we return to whole inner sensation field of the body. We depressurize our search for missing engagement by re-engaging what is missing from this moment of perception. Somatic interoception of your body’s current inner sensations allows us to engage with digital, social and mental information in a more balanced, grounded and less searching manner. While scrolling, surfing, viewing, texting, etc. make it a habit to maintain access to the whole inner sensation field of your living body. The missing excitement occurs here.
Many of Alyssa’s sex party observations involved self-image and the search for a missing validation and excitement through engagement with the bodies of others. It also struck me, reading her articles, that a lot of what goes on at these pseudo-Tantric, quasi-therapeutic, sex-themed socializings is a ritualized exploration of the philosophical nuances of consent.
Consent is fascinating. There is a unique magic and moral necessity that we encounter in the issues of permission & invitation. It is on the lips of every sociopolitical discussion from the last few decades. It almost seems like we late modern folks invented the ethics of consent — but of course we did not. What we might of have done, however, is to shift the assumed locus of consent. We so-called individuals ceased to think of permission as a public-mythic choice made by the family, the church, the kingdom, the ethnic community, into a choice made by a single personal body-mind. Very modern.
How does the concept of consent allow us to probe the mysteries of Missing Out? Two possibilities leap immediately to mind. The first occurs when you do not give permission.
The non-giving of permission frames situations in which there is abuse, encroachment, violation, etc. But even if the refusal is respected, one still becomes aware of the close proximity of the negated potential. We may not want it but we are nonetheless briefly aware of the salience of the missed opportunity.
Like most 15 year-olds, I was sitting at bus stop when an older man holding a hand-carved totemic staff started talking to me. Then he sat next to me on the bus. After a long conversation about psychic research, workplace witch hunts and alphabetic scripts (he had invented his own!) he invited me to get high and go to a sweat lodge with him. It felt unexpected and a bit creepy. Certainly not part of my day plan. I made an excuse and departed. Probably the right choice but, still, I have sometimes wondered...
Everything you don’t do lurks.
The other form of consent-based non-access, of course, occurs when you do not get permission. This immediately evokes an intriguing trinity of factors. You simultaneously deal with (1) your impulse (2) a barred possibility, and (hopefully) (3) an inner constraint or honoring of the other person’s NO.
It only lasts for a short window before our consciousness gets metaphorically defenestrated. Soon we will calm down, get distracted, move on or tell ourselves that all things happen as they must. But in this small window, the pain of a proximal but vanishing possibility exists. This is stronger in some than in others. A condition known as rejection-sensitive dysphoria is related to particular neurotypes and disorders.
Regardless of intensity, however, these windows of refused or thwarted attempts provide a kind of microscope for viewing the relationship between the anxiety of non-access and our inner doubleness. A student of Missing Out, in service to JOMO, can closely observe the strained interaction of Yes & No.
ESOTERIC TIP
Always rise hungry from a meal. This is old wisdom. In many yogic traditions it is believed that “satiation” is degenerative. It is an interesting and delicate principle which requires much alertness. Instead of an extravagant struggle between indulgence and restraint, it is the small, frequent and improvised effort of ensuring that you still feel that you are missing something. How much sweetness to put in your tea or coffee? Just a little bit less than you want. How much to eat? Almost enough to satisfy your hunger… but not quite.
This vitalizing thwart of our vital energies tends to make us more lively, sharper and healthier but it is not immediately pleasant. One must accustom oneself as if to the regenerative effects of a cold plunge. Nonetheless it is fascinating to experiment with the principle that a small dose of “missing out” is the spice you have been missing at every kind of meal.
The combination of Yes and No is ambivalence. Ambivalence is a rich territory. We seldom explore its nuances and variations. At least two (ambi) feelings (valences). Di-lemma. Inner friction.
Situations of potential “missing out” involve a double action in the nervous system that can be discussed as an interaction of affirmation and negation. Impulse meeting anti-impulse. This tension must then be creatively resolved by some method.
One method is cognitive dissonance. That is what we call it when our brain gets very troubled by a meaningful contradiction. Typically it shuts down, alienates responsibility or radically suppresses its knowledge about one of the conflicted feelings. We pretend not to experience any conflict between the two strong factors.
In Freudian ambivalence the child brain has basically three options when it tries to deal with two strong contradictory emotions such as “love mommy” and “hate mommy” which might result from a desperate desiring outreach that encounters a strong refusal of permission/engagement. That little brain can resolve this by either suppressing the feelings in numbness, drifting in a kind of neutral half-and-half state or inventing an imaginary world populated by simple opposing types of Good Mommies & Bad Mommies. Mary, Mary, quite contrary, as the Christians used to say.
Yet these interesting permutations do not exhaust the terrain of ambivalence. Consider the sweet balance of “sincere irony” that characterizes the Metamodern Soul. That is a delightful Yes-and-No but it requires work and finesse to hold the balance. And what about that famous religious slogan that describes the ideal of “being in the world but not of it?”
Trying to think more richly on this topic I made up two additional stupid words: contrabivalence & transbivalence.
By contrabivalence, I mean the intentional attempt to tolerate the inner conflict. A form of ambivalence in which we inspect our vague feelings and reactions to discern a polarity, disagreement or double-feeling and then attempt to more intensely occupy the friction between them. We focus our feeling capacity into the “grrrrrr” where the yes-and-no are pulling upon each other. This is potentially unpleasant. It is exactly what cognitive dissonance tries to avoid. Yet it is extremely useful as a technique for generating inner integrity by connecting our own alternatives in a very visceral way.
By transbivalence, I mean the gesture of intentionally stepping beyond our reaction to ambivalence but without negating its conceptual content. We do not deny that contradiction is in play but we do not physically or emotionally identify with it. Instead of being retracted, hesitant, waiting for the ambivalence to go away, we recognize it and reach beyond it. This is a kind of ol’ timey religious practice. Notice that you are acting “as though you have not really decided to be yourself.” Recognize your subliminal resistance to inhabiting THIS world, loving THESE people. Your chronic reluctance to live the universal as one particular life (which forecloses all other potential lives). Such self-recognition is often accompanied by a spontaneous whole-being gesture of renewed intentional commitment. Faithfulness.
The ambivalent person typically lives as though something essential was missing. The world is incomplete, or has not fully begun, or does not justify my full participation and affirmation. We can recognize this as a self-limitation but it does not make the world simple. The richness of disagreeing forces remains. The very act of commitment to the current actuality re-affirms the background world of other possibilities. But what is missing can be experienced deliberately as a fullness.
Spiritual teachers embedded in ancient traditions often deploy the folksy old saying that goes, “Chase two rabbits, catch none.” It is a wise caution. A certain degree of devotional intensity and singularity is needed in order to authentically participate in a transformational process. Depth of understanding is not produced by being seduced into the next book and the next. It comes from re-reading a complex book. Casual promiscuity of attention returns us to the flatland of seeking in which the lure of What Is Missing endlessly keeps us from growing and changing.
Yet this “wise war” against ambivalence is frequently exaggerated. The dogmatic fantasy of the Great Singular Once-and-For-All-Time Commitment is not true to the complexity and fluidity of Nature. All spiritual paths are syncretic. Everyone combines many things in their journey and deepens as they work with options, differentials, choice points. The hive draws its nectar from many flowers and only the rigid or domineering mind believes that a voluntary symbolic intensity can truly overcome all plurality, ambiguity and alternatives.
While there is much splendor in experiences that humans reach for the word “unity” or “oneness” to describe, there is also much idiocy in simplistic forms of mono-theism. They often attract and reinforce an uncivilized craziness that is so desperate to NOT feeling anything is missing, and to avoid any recognition of deep plurality, contradiction and ambivalence, that they undergo tremendous spasms of hostile degradation aimed at the delicate vitality of the world.
Consider the caricature of a rural, patriarchal dogmatist from a distant land who is suddenly transported to a new life in the motley menagerie of cosmopolitan capitalism.
Back in the old country, they kept women, at least in public, in shapeless black body-bags. One of the arguments in favor of this practice was that it kept women safe from men’s lascivious and aggressive gaze. In other words, it did not trigger men into an insane sense that they are missing out on the sexual possibilities of the bodies of random women. The pain of non-access to a potential is minimized. The chance of having to struggle between contrasting impulses is formally diminished.
But now, in the so-called West, this same fellow has to confront public toplessness, lurid advertising and the taut thongs of the intoxicated throngs of Spring Break! The machinery of marketing-driven liberal capitalism runs on the all-pervasive presence of intensified reminders of allurement. Double feelings are constantly generated. Constant activations and arousals must be met with constant self-control. Everywhere you look is a sign of something you are missing out on. And are you really expected to stay calm, carry on, say nothing, only surreptitiously glance?
The modernist ethos is an overwhelming market of deliberately evocative bodies, products, entertainments and news stories and it can only be survived by not reacting to very overt stimulations. Our dogmatist hates this. He feels a strong desire to violently destroy this carnival of provocations and escape into simplicity. If he does not actually become a crazed destroyer then he might instead fall into a habit of denouncing it verbally or digitally. Always offering his agitated opinion about the morally intolerable people who are shoving their provocations down his throat.
Yet is this situation not a tremendous opportunity to become more civilized? All these countless small contradictions between stimulating suggestions and necessary self-control impulses might slowly produce a subtler citizen. Everyone becomes a low-level courtesan or nascent sophisticate in world where attention control is necessary, contradictory messages abound, and the edge of Missing Out haunts our perceptual fields.
Alyssa manages fairly well to acknowledge and enfold her ambivalences, to suffer and inspect the many absences and un-acted potentials of the Asheville sex party. I think it was a civilizing episode for her but how wonderful that we get to miss out on any further details of the event!
IV. NON-ACCESS AS GENERATIVITY
Many of my own most formative experiences came when I did not go on a family trip, attend a party, or join in with a conventional event. Let us go beyond North Carolina sex parties and explore some of the ways that Missing Out has been seen as a creative source of new possibilities. JOMO is a pregnant goddess.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault famously argued that “Victorian Era” prohibitions on provocative imagery & speech (even the table legs must be covered!) actually functioned as form of productivity.
Studying historical documents, he discovered a dramatic increase in obscene and sexual content during this supposedly suppressive period. People were constantly inventing new ways to discuss and portray what had been foreclosed. He concluded that it may be fair to consider these “bans” and “censorship” as actually being generative devices whose purpose is to produce more erotic discourse. Now consider what Foucault is doing for himself as he creates that interpretation.
He is converting the idea of Missing Out into an idea of generative diversity. He senses, however obliquely, that there are ways to reverse the meaning of what we do not get to access — and study what it leads to as well as what it obstructs.
Of course this is also common wisdom. Necessity is the mother of invention. Inhibitions can be creative. But let us explore that through some of the themes we have already discussed.
The kind of people who might show up in Alyssa’s withdrawn tales of the Asheville sex party are often allied with other experimental liberal erotic communities such as Neo-Tantra and BDSM. Both of those examples are deeply involved in the attempt to produce value energy, experience and insight through withholding. Tantra’s concept of inhibiting sexual climax, and various practices of voluntary bondage, are ways of removing/missing something in order to heighten the feelings of pleasure, freedom and meaningful contact.
These communities suspect that they get something special by missing out on something obvious. They touch an intensified experience by deliberately putting many other things out of bounds.
I get it.
Once I was on a BC Ferries vessel (big boat) from Schwarz Bay to Vancouver when the captain announced that a pod of killer whales was visible out the starboard side. Everyone (including everyone I had been speaking with) leaped up and rushed to see these orcas. I deliberately did not. I stubbornly decided to look only at the ceiling until everyone came back.
And wouldn’t you know it! My perception of that ceiling was so vivid, so detailed, so juicy, that it still lingers in my soul as a form of high-caliber perceptual nutrition. An empowerment derived from insisting on missing out! Did I really just compare people’s BDSM to my brief time spent staring at the dull ceiling of a boat? Yes. Yes, I did. We are all going to have to live with that now.
My anecdote is an example of trying to profit from missing out on something with my attention. All concentration training has this basic form. It is not just intentional focus but also it involves subtracting a normal spontaneous object of awareness. Our species is straying further into an epoch in which automatic digital machinery is proactively colonizing people’s limited attentional resources and so we must seriously reconsider the ancient yogic practices of intentionally binding our concentration.
Attentional agency, in a world that aggressively attempts to co-opt this sovereignty, is largely the result of voluntary exercises in which we miss out on something. Rather than letting awareness go where it wants, we forbid it to go certain places. We tell it that it must forgo some of its options. And it will complain.
FOMO is the very essence of the “monkey mind” that wants to check on every seductive, exciting or seemingly novel perception. Any exercise in which you deliberately bind your attention is perhaps a holy service to the Goddess JOMO. She Who blesses us in that gap between What We Could Access & What We Do Access.
Nietzsche calls this a pathos of distance.
Pathos is a strong double-feeling or tension that is not suppressed or explained away. It is like a flow of subtle electrical sensations that you are not comfortable assimilating. Too much for your current comfort.
Either you break it off or else its potency will force you to adapt and mutate. The pathos of distance is the quintessence of missing out. It is our encounter with the sheer gap between ourselves and the Others. They saw the Orcas while I only (!) saw the ceiling. They went on the trip whilst I am left behind. No one let me know about the change in plans. She is above me in some hierarchy or capacity. He is below me. In truth, not everyone can be president. And I am eating while others are hungry. There is a profound distance possible between diverse forms of experience. We are not all equal in every way. We do not get access to everything.
Good.
Let it be Good.
I am reminded of the old joke. “You can’t have everything,” they say. “Where would you put it?” Yet there is an intensity hidden in this humorous platitude. It says that you must somehow learn to arrange your insides such that they tolerate vast disparities. Whether it is thwarted desire, missed opportunity or an encounter with the profound unfairness of the world, we can find this affective chasm in every situation. A vexatious experiential distance. A double pull. A tearing sensation.
Typically this was the domain of the ascetic mystics, yearning poets & whomever fantasized about becoming stronger through ordeals. Such mutants are uniquely oriented toward affirming the double sensation as a force that can be assimilated. They have a hunch about accumulating beingness by internalizing the subtle pressure that stretches between “this” and “the other.” They are perhaps saints or priestesses of the Goddess JOMO who have labored to create a holy attitude in which missing out, asymmetry, non-access, is a kind of virtue and power.
Good for them.
However in an age in which our exposure to possibilities is amplified, our presumption of access is intensified, and our economic systems run largely by encouraging us to feel that the gap between our experience and that of Others is intolerable, it may be that these old ascetic routines must become newly standard.
V. IT IS OKAY TO FEEL LEFT OUT IN NEW COMMUNITIES
I lead and/or participate in lots of ostensibly leading-edge and meta-level gatherings, retreats, and teachings. No one is more skeptical of those concepts than the people who attend such gatherings. They are my favorites. And yet even in these rarefied spaces, in which people select for a high level of adaptability, self-awareness and self-regulation, periodically someone gets bothered.
Are there any common patterns to what bothers them?
One thing that comes up a lot. Often with new and younger folks, is a sense of being excluded. Or, more excruciatingly, anxiety about potentially being part of something that might make hypothetical other people feel excluded. Or not even excluded. Just imperfectly included.
What are the signs of imperfect inclusion? Not everyone immediately understands all the “jargon.” People are not equally called upon in all discussions. They do not know the names of everyone who is being referenced. And the events are set up in a way that means not everyone can go to all of that.
This is both stupid and important. It is important to keep a fresh eye on any unnecessary in-group dynamics but it is also perfectly okay for any group to have in-group dynamics. Any culture wishing to promulgate itself has to have introductory on-boarding but, at the same time, the best way to learn the forest is to get lost in it a few times.
We must listen, empathize and, if necessary, modify circumstances based on people’s experiences. However, we cannot indulge people’s mere allergy about missing out. It is naive to feel that there is a problem wherever you do not immediately understand everything. This is also a critique of the popular regressive elements in contemporary civilization.
The mob spirit always feels pain in relationship to what they do not understand or cannot instantly access. The difference between a customer and looter is the amount of time and effort that they can tolerate between glimpsing something and accessing it directly.
To make ourselves stronger we should not normalize the attempt to preemptively solve the potential FOMO of others. Perhaps we should even, if we care about people, intensify that feeling. Provide more opportunity to explore and transfigure the pathos of distance. It is not necessarily negative.
Thank goodness you do not have to go to every sub-event with everyone else all the time. You can practice being selective, committing, surrendering alternatives.
Thank goodness there are words that you do not understand yet! Why would you bother to visit anyplace that does not have lots for you to learn?
Thank goodness you do not feel completely invited to everything! For you do not wish to be purely passive.
Thank goodness you did not immediately feel comfortable and in command of the discourse. You had some time to digest your feelings before speaking.
Etc.
INTERLUDE
I always (well, for a while) wanted to make posters that say something like:
THIS IS NOT A NON-JARGON SPACE.
THIS IS AN INTER-JARGON & TRANS-JARGON SPACE.
However, it would be unclear who is being served by such a poster!
My motive is to remind us that there is no perfect language. There is no universal on-ramp or simplification or perfectly accessible introduction. There is barely a “the public” anymore. There is no broadly shared grammar and sensibility that appeals to the fantasy of the averaged democratic majority.
While we can certainly build different communication spaces, including some that specialize in gentle introductory vibes, there is no getting around the fact that “fully accessible” is impossible and “too accessible” is almost bad for us. People who feel like they are part of a culture or philosophy that can cultivate a better world tend to get neurotically seduced by the possibility of The Best Way to Say It — the most inviting way to introduce it. And how much of that is just their own fear of missing out every possible new recruit.
Do we suffer from Meta-FOMO:
What if we miss out on people because they feel like they’re missing out on something???
Our anxiety about their anxiety often leads us to over explain. What if there is something we forget to tell them! What if they are a little bit uncomfortable at first because they do not know what to do! But most things, especially the basic things, do not require as much careful prepping as we might think. People figure it out. Setting up the space correctly means that people should more or less be able to start getting better at participating just by hanging out. Initial errors and confusions are essential parts of the learning process.
Some educational studies have suggested that giving the final exam, on the first day, to completely unprepared students, significantly increases their performance when the actual final exam comes. Struggling with present-time ignorance is a proactive preparation for understanding. It tells your brain what to remember.
We generally do not need as much “careful introduction” as our anxiety presumes. In fact we should be helping each other to feel more confident about being dropped into situations where we have to quickly get up to speed.
If we thrive through a more optimal relationship to what is not immediately known and mastered, then — what? We miss out because we fear to miss out? We cause others to miss out by trying to make sure they don’t feel like they’re missing out?
It’s more complicated than that but this is part of it.
ESOTERIC TIP
You remember I wrote a book about Gurdjieff. He has some famously harsh things to say about people. We are automatons, sleepers, fertilizer. Existentially insufficient. Of course he is not interested in defining the average person but rather in providing psychotechnologies to instinctively motivated esoteric practitioners. So what kinds of practices involve acknowledging our currently pathetic condition? One is simply to feel (or “remember”) the distance between yourself and your potential. Check right now. Are you in a peak experience? Is this the best you’ve ever been? Full capacities, consciousness and sense-of-being online at maximum? Fully energized by your highest values? Probably not. You are not currently a realized super-master. You are not even being totally authentically yourself right now. Heck, you can barely control your attention or remember your past epiphanies! It is a sorry state and you should let yourself deliberately feel how existentially inadequate you are. YOU ARE MISSING OUT ON YOUR DEEPEST SELF RIGHT NOW. But the goal is not to become depressed. The goal is enter into vital relationship with your optimal self. Why does it suck to be you? Because of specifically WHAT is missing. The absent “thing” is the version of you that is intrinsically (i.e. with no beliefs or assertions) optimal. You are spiritually substandard, right now, in relation to that Other You. Let yourself be burned more, and more often, by the simultaneous feeling of lack and remembrance that you have seen, been, or operated as the peak version of yourself. Every opportunity to feel that you are missing out on “being perfectly valuable” is useful if you remember which version of yourself contrasts that.
VI. OTHER PEOPLE’S RELIGION
During the 20th century there was an alarming defection of Judeo-Christian shamanoids, contemplatives & philosophers toward so-called Eastern mysticism.
Although there is much to learn from Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, etc., it remains peculiar whenever a person feels that, for example, ancient Sanskrit words from the other side of the planet might hold a spiritual power that is simply impossible to match in our own colloquial language. The ancient sages of India were working with their own very colloquial language. (See David Brazier’s The Feeling Buddha).
It is very natural to explore and seek human wisdom pathways beyond mere ethnic limitations but how much of this widespread 1960s movement was driven by a latent anxiety that our culture was missing out? Do we instinctively fetishize the wisdom and aesthetics of exotic paths when we have NOT learned how to trust or commit to our own style and language? Are even the best of us subliminally driven crazy by the notion of the Other’s secrets, powers & pleasures?
Even the Western discourse around how Modernity “disenchanted” the world relies on the seductive assumption that other people, in other places, at other times, were immersed in some highly meaningful and spiritual mode of living that we are missing out on. Certainly there have been some deep pockets of cultural history but I reckon we would feel like enchantment is located elsewhere even if that was the never the case. We bedeviled by Missing Out and perhaps that is maintained by our present lack of faith in JOMO.
We know the danger of letting our spiritual lives get contaminated by the need to access ancient or distant forms of the faithfulness that we think we are missing. At the end of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) Nazi hunters for sacred power, along with the morally ambivalent French archaeologist, open the lost Ark of the Covenant. Herein will be revealed the divine secrets that have been withheld from our own civilization.
Their faces initially register astonished wonderment. The glory of revelation. At last we are no longer barred from the spiritual wisdom of the Others. Just before their skin melts off their skulls in screaming agony.
Our hero, Indiana Jones, shuts his eyes tight and yells to his partner Marion: “Don’t look!” And later, in The Last Crusade, he also has to abandon the immortality of the Holy Grail in order to thrive and survive. Maybe all those movies were about overcoming FOMO on the spiritual search?
In July of 2010 two dozen people were trampled or suffocated to death at the German “Love Parade” music festival. Officials afterwards blamed the death on an insufficient number of doors and access routes which caused the crowd to become anxious about accessing that small number of options. The people at the love parade murdered each other because of a distributed fear of insufficient access. No really shocking. People are trampled to death every year in the Haj pilgrimage. It is normal to freak out when you feel like you are near to a magical thing and might not get access.
Still, when the thing is about the religion of peace or the festival of love, it gets a little weird.
This relationship between spirituality and missing out is interesting and we can push it all the way to the highest ranges of trans-paradoxical nonduality. You probably know that the highest Sufi mystics often propose that the heartbreaking sense of absence and longing for the Divine Other, the Beloved, is not the opposite of the faithful feeling of its omnipresence but rather the natural extension and amplification of that deeply satisfying condition.
We passionately yearn for an Ultimate, that we are missing out upon and which is other than us, BECAUSE it is already everywhere and non-separate from us. The boundary itself is an instance of the unbound condition. Perhaps it is the superlative instance. The difference between ‘getting access’ and ‘not getting access’ is dubious in nonduality.
Can we live in a manner in which the feeling that basic non-access is actually such a power of access that it energize us to make ever deeper and more profound creative attempts to establish functional relationships? Can we try to overcome what is missing, and get ourselves what we need, in ways that constantly express and reinforce the deep sense that we are not missing anything — precisely because missingness is itself an abundance?
That would require us to
(1) experience angst positively as desire or reverence, and
(2) experience desire as a form of pre-existing contact.
This is a profound inquiry if you are up for it. When you feel that you do not have enough of something in your life… could that be the actual presence of the “more” that you require? Not as an alternative to working on the real situation but as the basis from which to work happily on the problem.
Are you desperate for a love you do not have? Or is that desire already the presence of a love of which you want MORE?
Are you striving for more money — or already related, at a distance, to More Moneyness?
Are you out of touch with Nature — or is that feeling already the touch of nature like a small ember that could be whispered into a great fire?
There are no simple answers here. I have certainly raised some philosophical ideas and hinted at certain principles of inner practice but the overall goal of this article is to relentlessly remind you that “missing out” could be transformed into a positive feeling. We have looked at it from many angles, both serious and flippant, both ethical and indulgent. I have been trying to draw your attention, again and again, to the phenomenology of the gap between presence & absence, particularity & universality.
Phenomenology makes me think of Heidegger. He is a dubious character but I like his distinction between Death and Demise. Externally we see that every organism suffers a demise. Yet internally we do not know death will be. We have not experienced the subjectivity of it. Even if you believe in a thousand past lives, this person who you currently are does not KNOW what their Death will be like. At least according to Heidegger. He said that death (not demise) is specifically unknown. It is the possibility of the end of possibilities. The greatest FOMO of all. The point at which we miss out on everything.
And yet Heidegger thought we could live more authentically in the degree to which we accepted this radical limit on our possibilities. Many half-assed existentialists have taken this idea of being-toward-death as a prompt for resignation and despair. However another mood is possible. Without ceasing to strive for more and deeper lives, personally and in community, can we feel positively toward the possibility of the end of possibilities?
Can death (not demise) and, by extension, every loss in every moment, every path not taken, every non-equalized difference between ourselves and others, every reference we do not get, ever opportunity that we do not have perfect access to, be taken in the following spirit —
Good.
Very good.
I cannot wait to miss out!