Oh my God you are so missing out

It slaps me particularly hard when I peruse the local foodie blogs, reading about the latest and greatest San Francisco bars and cafes, boutique coffee joints and tasty underground lairs, gourmet pig butchering classes and DIY absinthe workshops, any of a thousand funky foodie trucks stopping by innumerable hipster brewpubs to serve up dim sum, crab cakes and pho from a tiny shiny kitchen tucked inside a large shiny Ford.

But that's not the only time I suffer. The damnable itch arises all sorts of places; it happened recently up at the swoony Wanderlust yoga/music fest in Tahoe, with its ridiculous surfeit of amazing teachers, friends, events, parties and cute hippie twirling sexy hula-hoop chant-riffic love-in group-hug Lycra spectacles. There were so many choices it became, well, impossible to choose.

It happens texting friends about their weekend plans. It happens skimming various tech blogs, tattoo magazines, Facebook event invites, architecture websites and travel blogs. It happens at any given summer festival, picnic, concert in the park. It happens when people show me pictures of my book visiting exotic locales. Hell, it happens walking down the street on my way to teach yoga as I pass by clubs and bars and sundry shops, saying "Oh my God look at that and that and that and I haven't even seen that before and when did that place get here?"

It is, in short, a form of insanity, a niggling madness, a never-ending, glorious hellbitch of a race that you can never, ever win. The only real question is, what are you going to do about it?

It is, of course, the white-hot urban affliction affectionately known as Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) hereby defined as that wildly addictive and yet totally nightmarish sociocultural dance whereby you are constantly being attacked by the overwhelming sense that so many wonderful, life-altering events are happening all around the city in any given moment that, well, there is simply no way to attend them all.

Result: the overwhelming feeling that you are, right now, missing out on some miraculous experience that is quite possibly the coolest thing ever to happen to anyone ever. Poor, poor, pitiable you.

This kind of madness, it can be downright dangerous. I have friends who suffer FOMO nearly every day, who almost never say no to a party or an invite to avoid getting knocked by the affliction, who try to cram in as much activity and social scene-stering as possible so they can build up an enormous repository of fantastic memories, friends, Evites, groggy morning-after stories, and mysterious bodily pains the genesis of which they cannot quite recall.

Of course, this only makes matters worse. No matter how many events you attend and how much experience you try to wring from the poor human body, the FOMO remains an ever-worsening death spiral of tantalizing possibility, a fun little monster that can never be fully sated. You know?

It's a fool's game. Much like quantum theory with an Ecstasy chaser and a great DJ, the instant you choose to do one amazing thing in this glorious City of multihappenings, you are therefore NOT choosing a thousand other stupendous options, which causes each and every one of them to gnaw at you like little demons of hey hey over here why didn't you choose me hey hey what's wrong with you hey?

What's more, much of FOMO's suffering is generated vicariously -Ð that is, based on accounts after the fact from giddy, exhausted, hung-over friends or co-workers, all about how last night's party/concert/stripper show/camel tossing event/hot tub grope-fest/drug-swap/fashion show was simply off the hook, out of control, once-in-a-lifetime, and how everyone got to go backstage with the band and did giant lines of cocaine from God's own nipples while choirs of angels lap-danced for Shiva in a hot tub full of dark rum, sticky love and fresh sunshine, as you -- poor, poor, pitiable you -- chose instead to stay home and watch "Grown Ups" on pay-per-view. Shudder.

It is a little surreal and also, it must be said, completely ridiculous. For FOMO is, in a way, also merely a yawning side effect of unchecked western wealth and prosperity, a great luxury of modern urban life, an embarrassment of riches.

Gosh, really? You say there are too many fantastic things to do? Too much to choose from? Too many restaurants, bars, cocktails, concerts, yoga classes, sex partners, books, gatherings, amazing people doing amazing things that titillate the senses and expand your body in new or wondrous ways? You are not exactly suffering. You are, you might say, spoiled beyond belief. Can you appreciate?

It only matters if it matters. The wise ones, as always, just wink and smile and tell us that you can never really be missing out, because no matter what you're doing, every single moment is actually full to bursting with divine richness, packed like a public swimming pool in a New Jersey summertime with howling, screaming divinity, raw and tactile and good. Hell, you can sit there and take a few deep breaths in the middle of a forest, and have more ecstatic joy than 100 Burning Mans on the moons of Jupiter. Well, maybe.

These masters of divine mischief, they remind us that the senses are always ready to offer their full expression, the heart is ready to feel everything in an instant, and full ecstatic consciousness is just a millisecond away. Dial into it just right, and missing out becomes, well, impossible.

You have, after all, to make a tiny but still profound shift in your awareness, a little click on over to dial into what the Tantrikas might call chid rasa (the fluid essence of consciousness) to ride the best ride of all.

It's like the great Taoist philosopher Lao Tse said, just before heading off to that new Vegas rooftop hookah bar/roller derby/burlesque review that promises to be totally offf the hook: "The greatest revelation is stillness."

Who would want to miss that?

Mark Morford's latest book is 'The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism'. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. His website is markmorford.com. For his yoga classes, workshops and retreats, click markmorfordyoga.com.

Mark's column appears every Wednesday on SFGate, and is frequently cross-posted to Huffington Post. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list, click here and remove three more.

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