Do you live by FOMO or by desire? Between scrolling through Instagram and the precarious nature of work, time has become a luxury. Withdrawal and doing nothing (from a Taoist perspective) as acts of sovereignty in the face of the tyranny of schedules.
There are words I first learned from the crypto world. For example, FOMO (fear of missing out) emerged during those bullish BTC cycles when new buyers didn’t want to miss out. When people start doing things out of fear of missing something, the effect isn’t just individual: the sum of those decisions creates a collective movement. You can see the same mechanism quite clearly in the world of consumption. Offers, for example, not only appeal to FOMO: they produce it, they work with it directly.
Since showing what we do has become a compulsion, many people share everything they do on Instagram stories or WhatsApp statuses. At some point, someone realized we are deeply needy and decided to capitalize on our insecurities, making exposure increasingly accessible until it became an addiction. Whether it’s a more or less desperate need for attention or just a desire to talk to someone, we showcase what we do hoping for reactions: a little fire emoji, a response, the start of a conversation. The latter is a typical mechanism of the chonguistic courtship.
At some point, someone realized we are deeply needy and decided to capitalize on our insecurities, making exposure increasingly accessible until it became an addiction.
It’s in this context that, as prosumers, going to a concert or an event becomes potential content. I’m not saying we’ve lost the ability to enjoy live music, but there’s something about a market sentiment that explains, for instance, the ten River concerts Coldplay held post-pandemic. More and more musicians are performing in stadiums, and until very recently, they couldn’t gather those volumes of audience or reach those ticket prices. Just like when we say “this meeting could have been an email,” we could say “this River could have been a Niceto,” if it weren’t for FOMO and the ways scarcity and anxiety are created through promotional and presale strategies.
Leonardo Mangialavori
I’ve been suspicious about plans since the post-pandemic, but in this last year, the topic has taken on a more personal hue, affecting me relationally and not just as a diagnosis of the contemporary world. Here in Argentina, it was very clear: when we could go out again and make plans with many people physically present in the same place, we quickly started to see this phenomenon of massive concerts and the boom in ticket sales. At that moment, we all saw a need to gather again, but that eagerness for connection was masking the fact that we had spent months locked up with our phones and computers and had learned to see the world through them. Regardless of how the pandemic affected each of us, it left shared marks. This is compounded by the gradual decrease in purchasing and saving capacity of the working class, a process of precarization that continues its inexorable course today and directly impacts our consumption patterns, and why not, our desires (a friend laughs when I say “taste of those who like me”: here it would mean wanting what we can buy). With our saving capacity diluted and the possibility of directing that remainder towards more substantial ends (upgrading the computer, traveling, not to mention a vehicle or property), that little money left at the end of the month gets burned on more accessible consumptions: a ticket, a night out, a plan. Something to do and, eventually, show. Experience and content.
Roberto Chuit Roganovich
Having made these points, I now focus on what’s happening with my plans. I would like to say no to every plan I’m invited to. Setting aside the risk of friendly ostracism (being left without friends or not being invited to things), which honestly isn’t what worries me, that rejection isn’t without cost. I struggle to say no, to navigate FOMO, and to bear the feeling of missing out on something, to be able to live peacefully with that abstention. And something even more annoying, that FOMO becomes personal: I take it badly, as if each invitation were interrupting or diverting me from what I really want to be doing.
Clearly, social media or the Internet in general don’t help with FOMO; they work with it. Sometimes it seems like too many things are happening at once, more than before; or is it that we see more things? Since the acceleration triggered by the pandemic, and I suspect also with the massive adoption of home office, scrolling has increased. The leisure time has atomized into mini moments of distraction where we disconnect from what we’re doing to scroll, perhaps simply because the compulsion has increased. I don’t want to generalize; of course, there are also people who have dedicated themselves to other things (having kids, for example).
In my current situation, I want to advance in writing a book, and since I still can’t get paid for doing what I love (misery loves company), to feel like I’m making progress in the task, I have to write during times I steal from work and other responsibilities I have, which I’d prefer not to have. I’m a slave to a bunch of economic responsibilities because I chose to live in an expensive city (though no one has ever died from contradiction). Following this desire to advance with my book writing, if at any moment “inspiration strikes” and I come up with an idea to develop, or I want to stay and write or just be at home doing nothing to let my ideas settle, I’ll have to sacrifice plans to do that. So, what happens is that every time my friends invite me to a plan, since I struggle to say no deep down, those invitations create discomfort for me and feel offensive. It’s like an inverted FOMO: not the fear of missing out on something, but the feeling that something is threatened, as if the invitation were already invading or disrupting a fragile balance.
Mariano Vilar
The first self-doubt this generates in me is that, deep down, my rejection of plans might be a way to make a point, to confirm something I can’t fully uphold on my own. As if the very act of saying no, of opting out, serves more than the time I actually gain by not attending that plan. The second is that my rejection might be a way to flaunt my willpower, in a gesture that aligns more with a pretense, whether conscious or unconscious, of moral superiority or a meritocratic statement of “those who strive, those who sacrifice, get what they want.” In either case, the problem seems to be the same: my dependence on external validation, my insecurity. Rejection thus becomes a performative action that reflects a need for approval, conditioned by the weight of others' gazes.
Every time my friends invite me to a plan, since I struggle to say no, those invitations create discomfort for me and feel somewhat offensive. It’s like an inverted FOMO.
As a direct closure to these questions, we could name the undeniable truth of time scarcity. Gold is scarce because when what’s in the mines runs out, we won’t be able to produce more (at this point, allow me to doubt). Time is scarce, it’s money, and it has become a privilege. Not only because we have to do more and more to survive, but also because even leisure is instrumentalized. We could conclude that we can’t do it all, that to do some things, we have to stop doing others. The day has 24 hours that can’t be stretched like chewing gum. That’s a neoliberal fiction that promotes individual accountability for discomfort: believing that we could be optimizing tasks all the time, and the guilt we feel for not being efficient.
Juan Ruocco 🧙♂️
But I’m not satisfied with any of these conclusions and decide to push my suspicions a bit further, just for sport. The idea that people can dedicate time to doing things that bring them pleasure and happiness is, for me, the only possible and expected horizon of autonomy. But this autonomy quickly shapes into individualistic retreat, and since individualism is capitalist by definition, I wonder how to distinguish it from that. I sense, not without some skepticism, that there might be something in the idea of “putting on your own mask before helping others” that could give us some clues. So, if I don’t have time to do what I love, and I can’t quit my job (because I don’t want to move back in with my parents or my partner), how do I free up time? Is it that the only form of liberation left is to dodge demands, to withdraw?
Doing nothing is the hardest thing in the world. Prioritizing what gives us pleasure is also difficult, because many of those things can’t be shown, don’t communicate anything, don’t make us appear as the most sociable or with a thousand friends, or the most productive or successful. One way to retreat could then be to conform to the logic of doing but not showing, to dial down the levels of narcissistic exhibitionism. This alternative would mean enduring that no one finds out, returning to privacy, doing things for oneself, and in that minimal gesture, reclaiming some cognitive sovereignty over one’s own attention.
It’s worth clarifying that when I talk about canceling plans, I’m not referring to crazy or convoluted plans, or culturally rewarding ones. Nothing like going to a book fair on a Sunday afternoon, a long-postponed gathering with friends of friends, a party where someone you like is playing but starts super late, a poetry reading in the middle of nowhere, a dinner with colleagues from a workshop you did ages ago, an exhibition that needs to be seen before it closes, or an event someone invited you to that you haven’t seen in a while. I’m also not talking about family or caregiving plans (visiting parents, grandparents, babysitting), which respond to different logics and needs. I’m referring to a dinner with close friends, getting together for a glass of wine, a beer, or mate with your closest friends.
Doing nothing is the hardest thing in the world. Prioritizing what gives us pleasure is also difficult, because many of those things can’t be shown, don’t communicate anything, don’t make us appear as the most sociable or with a thousand friends, or the most productive or successful.
Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about the culture of catching up, or catch up culture (I mean, it started popping up in my feed and suddenly it feels like an agenda topic, like everyone is talking about it, bubble filter and all). Getting together with friends just to catch up on each other’s lives because there’s no time to share together, to mess around. This kind of behavior reproduces the logics of capital valuation, making everything respond to a checklist where time is thought of as time invested in something that should yield a return. The only way to achieve autonomy and sovereignty over time is by liberating time from purpose, from utility. Because generally, when something is useful, it’s responding to external demands, to ideas of success that aren’t our own. Because messing around is important: having time to be bored, to stare at the ceiling, to turn off the TV in your brain, to make mental space. Like when you open windows to let in fresh air. For Taoism, emptiness is not a lack but a condition.
I’ve always been drawn to somewhat radical ideas: at one point, I had my crush on accelerationism, and more recently, on the withdrawal proposed by Bifo Berardi. I’m surprised to see how ideas can change over time, how they age or become something else. The compilation on accelerationism by Caja Negra is from 2017, and I remember that, at that time, right-wing accelerationism seemed interesting to me as a speculative hypothesis about the future, something distant, delirious. Today, in a global landscape undergoing a reactionary drift, which apparently took us a long time to see coming, and in a local context where it’s news that cynical businessmen like Peter Thiel spend time in Buenos Aires doing business with the government, what once seemed like a somewhat fanciful theory is starting to find ways to manifest in reality. Ideas like those of Nick Land, which I read as philosophical abstractions, today find more concrete forms of existence. Trying to place accelerationism and withdrawal on the same plane would be too linear a strategy. I’m bringing them together only because I see something radical in both: they both emerge as responses to the difficulty of sustaining life under current conditions. Both abandon the hope that things will change or improve, one pushing forward and the other withdrawing.
The withdrawal proposed by Bifo implies retreat, withdrawal, rejection. The first criticism one could make is quite obvious: not everyone can do it. One must have a certain material position for that retreat to even be a possibility. And as a Latin American woman, I find it hard to buy into that plan from a white European man; there’s something about it that doesn’t sit right with me. That seems to be the fissure in the proposal: that not everyone can withdraw without becoming exposed. For some, withdrawal might promise autonomy, and for others, the risk of losing it. In that sense, there seems to be a privilege bias in that possibility of stepping back. But at the same time, I can’t dismiss the power of the idea: can anyone think about withdrawal!? This serves, at least, to denaturalize wage labor, that first pyramid scheme, and to open the possibility of another relationship with doing. That’s where something that also interests me appears, the closeness to Taoism. The wu wei, the non-doing, the non-forcing, the non-overproducing. Not as a heroic retreat, but as a minimal, quieter way of stepping back (like in couple relationships, where sometimes the only way to win the argument is to lose it). Not responding, not entering, not insisting. If accelerationism pushes, withdrawal recedes; and Taoism, on the other hand, stays watching the ceiling. It doesn’t intervene, doesn’t oppose, suspends.
The only way to achieve autonomy and sovereignty over time is by liberating time from purpose, from utility. Because generally, when something is useful, it’s responding to external demands, to ideas of success that aren’t our own.
Bifo says that “only withdrawal would be capable of restoring a collective character to action, even if that action consists of not acting.” Here again, the blind spot of individualism operates. It would be beautiful to agree on the “common interest in seeking maximum pleasure for all sentient beings,” but it seems counterintuitive to do so from the standpoint of individual renunciation. Perhaps we could think of a kind of “strategic autism,” a collective withdrawal from participation? If capitalism needs the free flow of our libidinal energies, I think, based on Bifo, about how to make a common retreat from those energies. Changing the slogans: from Just do it to I’d prefer not to do it. Could it then be, and ultimately, that withdrawal could produce those effects of the good life that no political representation has?
Stop doing things the way we've always done them, or just stop doing things altogether. Think of not going to the plan, not just as a gesture of rejection or a stance, but as a simple way to make space. And endure making room for something that isn’t always clear, that isn’t always productive, that can’t always be shown. Yes, I arrived late because I didn’t want to come. It’s a lack of motivation that seeks to transform into another form of attention, another way of being in time, of operating with it.
