Chipping away at FOMO

To add is human, to subtract divine. – Anonymous

This weekend, I had two reasons to raise a celebratory toast.

All my running friends were running Mumbai Marathon. When registrations opened 6 months ago, I wasn’t tempted. When they were talking about hotel bookings, I wasn’t tempted. In the last week of tapering, no whiff of FOMO. And finally, as my friends WA’d me their times and splits after the race, definitively no FOMissedOut. Hooray for a small victory!

The second one came out of nowhere. Espncricinfo has been one of my daily go-to sites for as long as I remember. As I progressively reduced my TV cricket watching, the website visits assumed more importance. And it got added to my kill list for precisely that reason. I knew it would be hard so I had not put any timeline. As I walked to my favorite vegan restaurant on Sunday evening, I remembered that today was the ODI decider between India and Australia. As I instinctively fished out my smartphone, the naughty thought emerged “What if I DON’T follow this game? Could I? Could I really?” Back into my pocket the phone went. I’d check other things on my phone that evening but not Cricinfo. I went to bed without firing up the website on my laptop. I woke up Monday morning and didn’t check. Monday night is upon me and I still haven’t checked. Since I’m not in India, nobody around to even tell me what happened to the match. Ah! the delicious pleasure of it all.