FOMO...No More?

By Matthew H. Steilberg

October 11, 2018

 One of my earliest childhood memories is of a trip I took to Maine with Boy Scout Troop #840 from St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in the Bon Air suburb of Richmond. What a fantastic trip! And only a mere 2-day/13-hour ride in a smelly conversion van driven by our chain-smoking troop leader (whose name I won’t list here for sake of his anonymity…but his name was Mr. Stringer). 

This was in the day and age of CB radios though, and we all had “handles”. That’s the term for your “call” name, sort of like “Maverick” from the movie Top Gun!. Mine was Little Hard Crab, which incidentally was my Indian Guide nickname. We felt SO cool…and I can only imagine how tired over-the-road truckers grew over our constant transmission of “break 1-9 for a radio check, this is the Little Hard Crab come back”. 

And I’ll also never forget the mountain of discarded aluminum cans we’d collected from the roadside to trade in for the money that ultimately paid for my early introduction to second-hand smoke along this 500+ mile trip to the great northeast.

Here’s the other thing I remember about that trip: my mother helping me pack for it. And the one item I was most excited about? 

My Kodak 125 Instamatic camera. 24 precious frames I could shoot to document my odyssey. A miracle of modern technology as far as I was concerned. 

Do you remember these days? When you had a $9 roll of film giving you 24 precious frames to capture the memories of a lifetime? I do. I was given exactly one roll of film for the trip.

Which is why I was also coached by mom to be very CHOOSY about the pictures I took.  After all, I only had 24 and they would cost another $9 to develop (and take 5 days to develop) when I returned home to Richmond in two weeks. That’s less than two pictures per day I could take. I vividly remember seeing so many wonderful sights on that trip that I resisted the urge to capture on my Kodak Instamatic….

…because I only had 24. 

Still, it was a magnificent trip.

I just checked my iPhone X and it would appear that I currently maintain 2,079 different pictures on it – or, in Kodak Instamatic terms, or nearly 87 rolls of that film I treasured in 1975.  That’s almost $1,500 of the film and developing cost in yesterday’s terms! What’s even scarier is that my iPhone X will probably accommodate another 10,000 or more pictures before I run out of memory. No need to be choosy about what I snap, I can snap to my heart’s delight.

And so, like many of you, I do.

How small that 24-exposure Kodachrome roll of film seems now. And yet while technology moves us forward and makes our lives better, I stop and wonder: does it set us back? 

Have we made the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO for short) a thing of the past? I can capture any and every moment.

Can’t I?

Going back to my boyhood trip to Maine – yes it was fabulous – and yet I remember how I couldn’t WAIT to get my precious 24 Kodachrome pictures back from the developer. I couldn’t wait to have my family experience what I experienced!

Only they couldn’t.

The reality was that those 24 frames (costing $18 then worth $96 now – are you kidding me???) captured less than 5% of my actual experience on this great trip. Half of the pictures were fuzzy and practically worthless. You couldn’t even detect the names of my fellow scouts in the picture, let alone the beautiful scenery of Freeport Maine! Even the other half – that weren’t so fuzzy – didn’t even begin to capture the majesty that I saw as I thought to take the picture. 

I guess you just had to be there.

Still, my parents came up with facial expressions of faux wonder as I showed off my photos – but we both were unimpressed, and I knew it – even at age 13. The moment itself was special and the moment had passed – and the moment was incapable of capture. The photograph was but a fraction of the moment.

But that doesn’t stop us from trying, me included, especially with our mega-fortified mobile phones.

Several weeks ago, for lack of anything better to do, I found myself watching the PGA Golf Tour Championship as Tiger Woods completed his full-circle recovery from personal drama oblivion by winning the tournament. And yet what stood out to me the most as I watched each shot was how many spectators held up their cell phones to snap a photo as he struck the ball with all of his skill and greatness. 

Instead of just watching – and appreciating – the moment.

Maybe they just had to capture the moment because we’ve made it so easy to do just that. One need no longer carefully choose each picture snap – after all, I don’t have just 24 on my roll of film, now I have thousands. 

They – and I – can snap pictures without one single care of approaching the last available frame. And yet in capturing the moment, they may have well missed the moment in its entirety. 

I wonder when these fans got home and back to work on Monday if they bragged a poor shot of Ole Tiger to a fake-impressed co-worker by trying to finger-zoom it so they could exclaim “wow, that’s Tiger! I think? It is Tiger, isn’t it?” You really saw Tiger!

Or did they?

Yes, the spectator had, indeed, captured a first-hand account of one of the greatest golfers of all time and could not only prove it to friends and family with hard evidence, but they can now endlessly “sweep” through their digital photo album to remind themselves of that great…

…moment.

But the digital picture can’t capture the moment, the moment is now gone, and it’s conceivable – no, likely - the spectator missed the moment in its entirety. And they’ll never get it back because, instead of burning the image in their mind, they instead chose to burn it in an iPhone.

It makes me wonder if the traditional, the archaic, the “un-technological” human mind and spirit are far more powerful than the iPhone X. Or any iPhone (Galaxy, Droid, etc.) to come. How do I know this?

…I close my eyes and I remember the moment I nervously said “I do” to my still beautiful bride, Ann

…I treasure experiencing the miracle of three childbirths and wonder how anyone can say that God doesn’t really exist.

…I recall a misty mountain stream in 1992 as I caught my first rainbow trout with a fly-fishing lure I’d tied myself or the iridescent purple majesty of a Great Wicomico River speckled trout as I pulled it in my canoe on a cool morning in April just this year.

…I think of the smallness I felt as I gazed at the sheer banking skyscrapers of Charlotte North Carolina on the day I started my first real job in June of 1987

…I marvel hundreds of radiant sunrises over the Chesapeake Bay as I tried to figure out where our planet ends and heaven begins. 

None…not one…of these experiences could ever hope to be fully captured by the snap of a camera, yet these images are as vivid in my mind as the day I first saw them. Maybe even more so, as I consider my gratitude at having been a participant of these moments.

Days will progress and I, like so many others, will wonder at what technology will soon enable. I can now start my car from 100 miles away simply by pressing a few buttons on my iPhone X. More importantly, I can activate the seat-heater on a cold morning to come before I head to work. My world is easier and more convenient, for sure. Make no mistake, that heated seat feels good when it’s but 10 degrees outside.

May I never forget, though, the true splendor that is my own imagination nor the memories of moments I once sought to “capture” and instead now resolve not to miss. As I write I am listening deeply in the dark to the beauty of a tropical storm remnant with the winds rushing through the locust trees and river waves meeting the shore.  

The best technology of all is the infinite capacity of the mind that God has given me. Maybe we should all put the phone (camera) down…and appreciate…the moment. 

And in that appreciation may I forever lose the Fear of Missing Out.