Social media is triggering 'Fear of Missing Out' amongst the youth, precipitating depression and loneliness.

What the line is asking

• FOMO: anxiety that others are living a better reel.
• Youth: students, first jobs, migrants in cities — identity still forming.
• Depression and loneliness: not slang; health outcomes. Do not diagnose the examiner. Show mechanism.

Self

• Comparison is older than the phone; the phone made it 24-hour and ranked.
• Sleep, body image, exam panic: the personal desert.

Market and design

• Notifications, streaks, “others are online”: engineered restlessness.
• Influencer economy: luxury as artificial poverty (cousin of the Socrates line).

Society

• The feed is a crowd that does not return a favour. Durkheim’s anomie in a new dress.
• Family WhatsApp can be care or surveillance; name both.

State and school

• Digital Personal Data Protection, IT Rules, school phone policies: clumsy, necessary experiments.
• Public parks, libraries, sport: offline commons so missing out is not the only fear.

The counter

The same tools organise a protest, a study group, a job, a queer youth’s first safe room. Ban-as-solution is a desert. The essay fails if it only scolds. Demand design that does not harvest panic, and skills to leave the corridor.