The idea of YOLO with a dash of FOMO.

by novemberyankeecharlie

FOMO. A term I hold in the same regard as YOLO. I don’t despise it like many friends of mine do, however in saying that I don’t like it either.

YOLO, you only live once, has become an excuse for our generation to be the most selfish, self absorbed creatures that have ever walked this earth. It’s an excuse for anything and everything we do. It’s a ‘live in the moment’ mantra that our parents and grandparents didn’t have the luxury to experience. We apply it to everything from a big night out on a Wednesday, to that summer we can’t afford in Europe. YOLO, right? If we don’t do it now, we never will, right? Our generation has decided to act like we have a death sentence around the corner, YOLO is our inoperable cancer.

FOMO, fear of missing out, is something I openly admit to having back home in Melbourne. All it took was one person to tell me about people getting together for a drink, dinner, lunch, coffee, and I just had to be there. However the term FOMO has changed for me these days. It’s not a matter of me missing out on something because I’m spending the night at home in Melbourne. Now, it’s about the fact that I live on the other side of the world and my only option is to miss out on these moments with the people I hold close.

I read an article recently about the ex-pat culture, the idea of creating another life somewhere. The initial excitement, the immersion in culture and lifestyle, closely followed by the realisation that all of this is slowly taking you further from the life you once had. I’ve figured that if you stay away long enough you find yourself in a type of purgatory; belonging in two places but never feeling at home in either of them. I just spoke to my closest friends back home tonight, they were at a mates birthday drinks, drinks I would normally be at. They were all on the better side of a bottle of booze and having a great time, it was 8pm in Melbourne and I’d just finished work at 5am in New York.

I’m starting to realise that the choice to stay away has consequences. At the moment my life and what I’m doing here in New York is outweighing any reason I have to return to Melbourne though. Give me another 6 months and that answer might be different. Right now I have no answers, I’m happy and I’m happy to hear every little piece of news from home, no signs of FOMO just yet.

I do have questions though; how long can one stay away from home? When does ‘away’ become home? Is purgatory a place I wish to be? History tells me that purgatory is a place for the disenfranchised, the ghosts of people stuck between two worlds. That doesn’t seem like a path I wish to take, but just maybe I can have an affinity with two cultures, two cities that mean the world to me. Surely the opportunity to at least try and have that is worth it.
YOLO, right?