You Are Not Behind. You Are Watching Someone Else’s Highlight Reel
Picture it. You open your phone for a quick check, and twenty minutes later you know that a former classmate got promoted, a cousin is on a beach in Bali, and a stranger launched a business that already has fifty thousand followers. Nothing in your own life changed. Still, you feel a little smaller than you did before you looked.
That feeling has a name. Fear of missing out, or FOMO, is the nagging worry that other people are having richer, better experiences while you sit on the sidelines. Psychologist Andrew Przybylski and his colleagues described it in 2013 as a persistent anxiety tied to our need to feel connected and accepted. More than a decade later, it has only gotten louder.
I recently looked at FOMO through an unusual lens, the Qur’an, in a paper I wrote with two co-authors. This piece covers the parts of that work I think matter to anyone with a phone, whatever they believe.
The tech is not the whole story
The easy take is to blame the apps. I don’t buy it. Technology is a tool. The trouble starts when we hand over the job of measuring our worth to other people’s feeds.
Social psychology has said this for decades. Leon Festinger argued back in 1954 that humans judge themselves by comparing themselves to others. Social media hands that old habit an endless supply of material. Research by Vogel and colleagues found that exposure to people who seem to be doing better is linked to lower self-esteem.
Here’s the thing, though. What we compare ourselves to is not real life. People post a curated version of themselves, with the wins and the happy moments and very little of the mess. So you set your full, complicated life next to a stranger’s trimmed highlights and wonder why you come up short.
What an old text says about a new habit
I want to be careful here. The Qur’an never mentions FOMO, and I am not claiming it does. Reading modern ideas into an ancient text is sloppy scholarship. What we did instead was gather verses on themes that match the behavior and read them alongside classical and modern commentary, a method known as thematic interpretation.
The verses are striking when you read them next to your own screen time. One speaks about wishing for what others have been given (4:32). Another describes worldly life as play, show, and competing over wealth and children (57:20). Another warns that rivalry in piling up more keeps people distracted (102:1-2). A passage on social conduct warns against mocking others and hunting for their faults (49:11-12), which sounds a lot like a comment section. And one verse urges patience and a steady focus rather than treating worldly life as the only scoreboard (18:28).
From these, a set of values comes through that works like a practical toolkit.
Qana’ah, or contentment. This does not mean laziness or giving up on ambition. It means keeping your wants in proportion, so other people’s wins stop feeling like your losses.
Syukur, or gratitude. Think of it as an inner habit that moves your attention from what you lack to what you already have.
Tawazun, or balance. Technology serves you when it stays in its place and starts to hurt when it takes over your day.
Self-control. Wanting to follow every trend and check every update is natural. Acting on every urge is a choice.
A clear sense of purpose. When you know what your life is for, it gets easier to ignore what is merely popular.
Why this reaches beyond one faith
You do not need to share my religion to see the sense in this. Contentment, gratitude, and purpose show up in nearly every serious tradition of thought, and psychology keeps landing in the same place. Self-Determination Theory says we all need to feel connected to others. That need is healthy. It becomes a problem when approval from strangers turns into the main way we decide we matter.
The simplest claim in the paper is the one I would stand behind most. Dealing with FOMO takes more than cutting back on social media. Deleting an app can help for a week, but if you still measure yourself against everyone you know, the anxiety will follow you to the next platform. The real fix is a shift in orientation, in how you see yourself, your life, and what counts as success.
A small experiment
Next time that sinking feeling shows up mid-scroll, try this. Stop and name one thing in your life that you would not trade, however good the other person’s post looks. Then put the phone down for ten minutes. It will not solve everything, but it points you in the right direction.
You are not late. You are not behind. You are looking at a small, polished window into someone else’s life and mistaking it for the whole house.
About the research: the full study, written by Sholihatut Diniah, Usman Ayub, and Muhammad Saad Ahmad, is published in Al-Muallif, Journal of Islamic Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2026), pages 42-66. Read it at https://doi.org/10.64126/al-muallif.v1i1.120
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Opinion Desk.
