iPod Syndrome and the FOMO machine

Staring at a blank page in Microsoft Word¹ can be a traumatic experience. Not only is it empty, but the huge range of features, add-ins, and settings within it can also make you feel like there’s just too many potential ways to fill that void, and how will you ever pick the right one? “Here’s every imaginable option—good luck!”

iPod Syndrome

This crushing feeling isn’t unique to Word.

The first time I deeply felt it was with the iPod circa 2004, after I’d ripped every one of the hundreds of CDs I owned onto a Dell tower PC via iTunes. That app showed you the duration of your entire library; mine was ~28 days after finishing the ripping. I’m positive there were songs I ripped on my very first day of iPod ownership that I never listened to all the way until I retired my last iPod Classic in 2012².

Excess was built into the iPod from its conception, indeed, it was memorably marketed as “1,000 songs in your pocket.” Here’s Steve Jobs upon its 2001 launch (emphasis mine):

With iPod, Apple has invented a whole new category of digital music player that lets you put your entire music collection in your pocket and listen to it wherever you go.

On one of my previous blogs, I perceived such excess negatively, dubbing it “iPod Syndrome” and defining it as “one of the most noticeable effects of being deluged by ‘content’…the way your head can feel foggy and your body exhausted by needing to scroll through endless menus and apparently infinite choice.” A college friend had summed up the result of this “syndrome” as:

The more music you have, the less of it you listen to.

Long ago, Microsoft would’ve been my go-to avatar for what induced this feeling, due to the obvious complexity of every part of Office. Word’s bloat scared me off from even diving into writing at times. But now, it’s Apple—because beneath the simple exteriors of the company’s devices are the most efficient machines ever built for accessing content and inducing decision paralysis:

• Apple Music boasts 100 million songs and 30,000 playlists, all ad-free.
• The App Store generated over $1 trillion in sales and billings in 2022.
• Infinite-scroll social media is better built-out on iOS than any platform, thanks to clients that Android and desktop OSes can’t match³.

All of these interfaces, available 24/7 via my phone that’s always with me, induce a lot of anxiety for me. There’s more than could be consumed in a lifetime, and I’m left feeling like I did in 2004—that I have everything with me, but that I can’t sort through it all. I end up wishing for fewer choices, more constraints, anything that could force a decision for me.

One of my last clear memories of music before the iPod was bringing a Discman with me to a coffee shop in Rhode Island, with just one disc in it and no others with me. I got to explore the album I had with me through repeated listening instead of jumping between options looking for the next fix.

The FOMO machine

Constraints like that one make it so that FOMO (fear of missing out, which is foundational to iPod Syndrome) is less of a burden, because there’s no illusion that you have access to everything at all times. FOMO bites hardest when you have:

• No structure, either to your time or what you’re doing.
• Too many options, such that more than one of them seems “right.”
• Deep insight into what other people are doing, so you can see that they’ve chosen something different (and surely better than whatever you did).

Recently on Mastodon, someone described would-be Twitter rival Bluesky as a FOMO phenomenon, driven by people anxious for invite codes (you can’t just sign up). But once they’re there, they don’t seem to post that much, and they end up back on Twitter (or Mastodon, the platform that Bluesky diehards look down on).

That’s how FOMO works: It sacrifices the moment for something that’s never as good as you imagine. It appeals only because you don’t have it and because it seems to present an infinite canvas, which once you find it, isn’t infinite at all because you don’t have the capacity to ever “finish” exploring it.

Bluesky isn’t some unspoiled social media utopia, some Arcadia in the clouds; it’s smaller than most big subreddits, and pretty boring. Likewise, all the music among the practically infinite options out there, which I figured had to sound better than whatever I wanted to listen to at any point in time on my iPod or on any music device/service since then, was often not as satisfying—I was listening to my Anjunabeats records because I liked them, not because I was using them as some stopgap til I found the real prize.

So I try to keep my media libraries small and not spend too much time wondering if I’ve made the optimal choice. Life’s short and I don’t want to lose a lot of it in scrolling and debating what to listen to, what to watch, what to read. Going with the first thing that comes to mind is often much more satisfying than a drawn-out decision.