Everyone seems to be moving faster than you: where FOMO came from, why you are comparing your backstage with their stage, and how to step out

There is a feeling that is hard to name: you are fine, you open your phone for five minutes, and suddenly your life feels slow. An old classmate has bought a house. A former colleague has made director. A friend is in Iceland. Nothing in your own life changed in those five minutes. You have simply seen twenty people at the best moment of their week.

In 2004 Patrick McGinnis, a student at Harvard Business School, wrote a piece for the school's student paper describing the fear of missing out that kept his classmates from turning down any party or event. He called it FOMO. Facebook was a few months old. The word later made it into the Oxford dictionary.

The comparison you are making

In 1954 the psychologist Leon Festinger described something that sounds obvious: people judge themselves by comparing with others, especially when there is no objective yardstick. Nobody knows whether they earn "enough" or have achieved "enough" until they look sideways.

The problem is that you know everything about your own life: the hesitations, the evenings that went nowhere, the unanswered emails. About other people's lives you know exactly what they choose to show you. It is not an unfair comparison. It is not a comparison at all, because the two sides are not in the same units. You are comparing your backstage with their stage.

What makes this harder than it used to be is scale. Our grandparents compared themselves with a few dozen people in the village. You compare yourself with thousands chosen by an algorithm precisely because they have something worth showing off. Nobody is built to take that comparison every day.

Thirty minutes a day

In 2018 Melissa Hunt's team at the University of Pennsylvania split over a hundred students into two groups. One used social media as usual. The other was limited to ten minutes per platform, about thirty minutes a day in total, for three weeks.

By the end, the limited group reported noticeably less loneliness and low mood, especially those who had shown signs of depression at the start. Both groups reported less anxiety and less FOMO, perhaps just from paying attention to their habits. Nobody had to delete an account. Only use less.

Four things that actually help

• Change the question. Not "am I behind them?" but "is what they have something I actually want?". Very often the answer is no.
• Unfollow accounts that make you feel bad, even if the people are kind and you like them. This is a matter of nerves, not of affection.
• Set a fixed point of comparison: yourself a year ago. It is the only one in the same units as you today.
• Message someone you envy privately and ask what the hardest part has been. The answer almost always shrinks the picture back to its real size.

Nobody posts the three years where nothing happened. Everybody has them.

On being slow

Something rarely said: lives do not run at the same pace, and that is not a fault. Julia Child published her first cookbook at 49 and went on to become America's best-known cooking teacher. Vera Wang designed her first wedding dress at 40, after missing the Olympic figure-skating team and spending nearly two decades as a fashion editor.

Late starters rarely talk about the long years that seemed to go nowhere, so we feel those years do not exist. The useful question is not where you are compared with others but whether you are heading where you chose. The first changes every time you open your phone. The second only you can answer, and it does not depend on who posted what today.