Social Media Is Triggering Fear of Missing Out Amongst the Youth, Precipitating Depression and Loneliness

In 2004 a business student named Patrick McGinnis wrote a short column in the Harvard Business School newspaper about a restlessness he saw among his classmates, who worried that they were missing the best party, the best internship or the best conversation that was going on elsewhere. He called it the fear of missing out. Within a decade the phrase had entered the dictionary, because a technology had appeared that put the worry into everyone's pocket. The topic claims that social media triggers this fear among the youth and that it precipitates depression and loneliness, and the claim deserves a careful hearing.

The argument starts with an old idea. In 1954 the psychologist Leon Festinger proposed that people judge themselves by comparing themselves with others. In a village the comparisons were limited, and a young person measured himself against a few dozen neighbours. Online, the comparison class is the world. Feeds show weddings, holidays, promotions and perfect bodies, selected and filtered, and a person sitting alone in a hostel room compares his unedited Tuesday with other people's edited highlights. The comparison is unfair, but the feeling it produces is real.

Researchers have tried to measure the feeling. Andrew Przybylski and colleagues published a scale in 2013 and found that young people with higher fear of missing out used social media more heavily, checked their phones at inappropriate times and reported lower satisfaction with life. Leaked internal research from Facebook in 2021, reported in the Wall Street Journal, suggested that the company's own studies found Instagram made body image worse for a share of teenage girls. Whatever the company's public statements, its researchers had seen reason to worry.

The wider context adds weight. In 2023 the United States Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory calling loneliness an epidemic and noting that it carries health risks comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues in The Anxious Generation that the rise of smartphones in the early 2010s coincided with sharp increases in anxiety, depression and self harm among teenagers in several countries, and that a childhood spent on screens has replaced one spent at play with other children.

Whatever the company's public statements, its researchers had seen reason to worry.

Yet the evidence is far from unanimous. In 2019 Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski analysed three large datasets covering hundreds of thousands of adolescents and found that technology use explained a tiny fraction of the variation in wellbeing, less than eating potatoes or wearing glasses did, as they pointedly noted. Other researchers answered that averages hide the harm done to a vulnerable minority, and that the time spent online is a crude measure of what matters, which is what a young person is doing and how it makes him feel. The question is open, and honest scholars disagree.

Causation is also uncertain. A lonely or depressed young person may turn to a screen because other forms of company are not available, so that the feed is the symptom and not the cause. Alternatively the effect may run both ways, with the unhappy retreating to their phones and the phones deepening the unhappiness. Only experiments can separate these, and the few that exist, in which volunteers were paid to quit Facebook for a few weeks, have found small improvements in wellbeing. They are modest results and hard to extend to years.

Design choices deepen the problem. Infinite scroll, autoplay and notifications that arrive at unpredictable moments borrow from the mechanics of slot machines, keeping users on a platform past the point of benefit. Former employees of technology companies have said publicly that engagement was the goal and that the effect on the mind was a secondary matter. A young person is not simply choosing to scroll but is facing a system engineered to make stopping difficult.

It would be a mistake to see only harm. For a teenager in a small town who is gay, disabled or interested in an unusual subject, the internet may be the first place in which others like him can be found. During the pandemic of 2020 and 2021, when schools closed, friendships continued through screens that could not have continued without them. Young Indians in towns without libraries or coaching centres have learnt mathematics and languages from online videos. The same tool that isolates one person connects another.

India faces these questions with a particular intensity. It has more than half a billion social media users, among the youngest populations in the world, and competition for places in colleges and jobs is fierce. A student preparing for a national examination watches the success stories of toppers shared on the internet and may conclude that everyone is passing but him. The pressures of family expectation and economic anxiety, which long predate smartphones, find a new amplifier. Counselling in schools remains thin, and the stigma around mental health stops many from asking for help.

Policy has begun to move. Several American states have limited access for minors, and in late 2024 Australia legislated to keep children under sixteen off major platforms. Such measures may help, but they are blunt, and they leave open the question of how to teach young people to use the tools well. Media literacy, the cultivation of offline friendship, limits on notifications and design that does not reward compulsive scrolling all address the mechanism and not just the age. The stronger answer lies in strengthening the real world to which a young person might turn.

There remains a question that data have not yet answered. The fear of missing out assumes that there is a party worth attending somewhere, and it is created by the knowledge that others are enjoying it. Yet much of what appears on the feed is staged to produce just this envy, by people who feel the same fear while posting it. If everyone is afraid of missing what everyone else is performing, then the missing thing may not exist, and it is hard to tell whether the youth are suffering from exclusion or from a spectacle that no one is actually attending.