Joy in Missing Out

When I quit Facebook in 2016 I never felt as if I’m missing out on anything. I don’t really care about what’s happening in the lives of virtual strangers who are purportedly my “friends”. I don’t want to lay eyes on the insipid things they share or read the callous, malicious thoughts they insensibly put out in public. I cannot take the low-key bragging, the overblown outrage over trivial matters, the calculated equivocations ubiquitous in news feeds. When I switched off Facebook and along with it the ambient noise of other people’s lives I felt relieved. And since then I feel joy, not fear, in missing out.