Dear Reader,

Your F.O.M.O. is justified.

“Experts” might have you believe that your Fear of Missing Out, also known as “the uneasy and sometimes all-consuming feeling … that your peers are doing, in the know about, or in possession of more or something better than you” (according to a study done at Texas A&M University), is driven by your own neuroses: insecurity, jealousy, anxiety.

They might have you believe that it’s all in your head.

Sounds like gaslighting to me. It’s possible that some “scientists” sat down and did “research” and came to “conclusions” supported by “data,” but that’s all noise. You’re missing out on everything, dear reader, and you should be scared.

But I’m not talking about whatever you saw on your Snapchat story the other day. It’s possible that you’re missing out on the Ice Cream Museum, which your “friends” went to without you, but that’s not really important.

I’m talking about the masses of information that will never touch your feed, all the knowledge and the stories that you will never see or hear of. But this column isn’t here to fill in the gaps — I don’t presume to know any more than you. We’re all missing out, all the time, together.

While my amazing co-Editor-in-Chief, Amanda, is going to give you sound advice that’s actually relevant to people’s lives over the next seven issues, I’m going to (somewhat pointlessly) consider a lot of abstract questions. This column does feature things “you’re missing out” on, but it’s also about why we receive the information that we do, how we get it, what we’re getting and how it gets distorted in the process.

Especially now, when we spend much of our lives on the Internet, or talk about things that we’ve seen on it on the Internet, we are flooded with information, so what’s scarce is not knowledge, but attention. What are you paying attention to, and what are you missing out on?

If you, dear reader, have anything you feel like people are missing out on, please feel free to contact the writer via LoopMail or otherwise. Up first, in Issue 2: fascist dog-whistles.