the fear of missing out

I find myself increasingly worried that I might be missing out on a more emotionally and creatively rich life

As I have grown older I have become acutely aware of doors closing. Not closing due to timelines, but due to tradeoffs. When one door closes, it closes to all the doors behind it, and, besides, I am only capable of walking through one door at a time.

I am not a fan of my newfound maturity as it comes at a much greater price— the loss of idealism. Is it actually possible to live abroad while remaining close and connected to one’s family? Can I dedicate all my time to writing while giving back to my community? Can I be a woman of the world yet retain my privacy and solitude?

My fears fall outside the bounds of the fears I hear from normal people in San Francisco. A fear of missing out on owning a home in Pac Heights or flying first class. A fear of not attending the coolest parties in the world, such as Peggy Gou playing in Ibiza, or, god forbid, parties among tech elites so exclusive that I am entirely unaware of them. A fear of never IPO-ing. Of being forty and starting at the bottom of a new career. Of never becoming the top law professor at Stanford Law.

These are not my fears, but I do have my own version of them. I have found myself increasingly thinking about how I might be missing out on a more emotionally and creatively rich life. For example, I was visiting my mother’s hometown Udupi in southern India, a place I also call home, and in my few weeks there I could not help compare its cultural richness with my more tame life in San Francisco. All things considered, my life in Telegraph Hill is pretty vibrant. There is music, dance, language, art, film, discussion, and books, and yet it cannot hold a candle to what Udupi can offer me.

Then I wonder, what if I did not know about Udupi at all? What if, not only had I never been there, but I did not know it existed? I did not speak Kannada, I was not Indian, and I did not have family roots to this place. Instead, what if, like our elderly white neighbors whose furthest travel is to Houston or Arizona, whose only language is English and only religion is Christianity, what if I was like them and my existence limited to a few planes? What then?

Language is a portal to a new realm. There are many realms I am yet to experience, how will I get to them all? Relationship is also a portal. I wonder, who is missing from my life? Who might change my life that is yet to enter it? How do I meet them?

The key to each portal is curiosity. I trust mine and use it as a compass. What I have discovered is that I am not curious about hate, in the sense that, I am not curious to understand intolerant ideology. The highest office in the land embodies intolerance and is attempting to spread it widely, from sea to shining sea, yet I cannot find it in myself to feel curious about their beliefs. Even if another person, say the man seated next to me on the bus or the woman who lives above us, subscribes to intolerance, I might be curious about them and their story, but I am not curious abut the ideology itself. The reason being that hate, regardless of its politics, is the opposite of curiosity— ignorance. Ignorance is easy and requires no mental or emotional effort. Why write? Why read? Why strive?

Empathy and love is a worthy challenger for me. It is a steady, uphill climb that makes me sweat and my thighs burn. If I cannot detect love, beauty, or humanity as the fountainhead of an idea, my curiosity goes dormant.

I fear missing out on the layers of life’s richness that await my excavation. The portals that await my crossing. The realms unexplored. Here in Silicon Valley I see many people lunging to catch onto the latest trend, as if another will not follow. Those with impressionable imaginations are like this, easily drawn to the ideas and topics of the day. Then there are those with an imagination that creeps and crawls into the earth, like roots seeking water. We call it blue sky thinking, as if ideas fall from the sky, but I know that ideas come from history, which we can only find buried deep in the ancient, fertile earth. It is this style of imagination that will reveal more intrigue in the workings of a blade of grass or in the suffering of an addict than in a slew of headlines.

If I could share what it feels like to be Kannadiga, to belong to Udupi and to my family, I would. It is a wondrous and transcendental feeling. However, to be capable of immense joy is also to be capable of great sorrow. It is the sorrow one feels when they hear that a family friend is going blind. That an aged mother is being passed around home to home, unwanted by her adult children. That a neighbor only has a few months to live. In order to know someone else’s Udupi, I will also need to know their hell.