FOPO

Social psychologists like to describe our brain comparison machines as a "sociometer". That's a gauge hidden inside our brain, running from 0 to 100 to denote where we stand in the local prestige rankings, moment by moment. 

Think about the electricity bill you receive once every month, after which you will know your electricity consumption. If you're meticulous, you can view your meter in real time. Most of us won't bother to do that. Now we do. We check the sociometer, swiping through bottomless feeds. Post a picture with beauty filter on Instagram or Snapchat, and see if this dials up your sociometer score, as reflected by the number of followers, likes, shares, or comments. That is the way to move the needle in most adolescents' sociometer. 

I read about the mechanics of this maladaptive sociometer in the book The First Rule of Mastery. That's about the three phases of a FOPO loop. FOPO means our "fear of people's opinions". The circular cycle begins with an anticipation phase: think about browsing through our closet before a social gathering. Or else, photoshopping or airbrushing the photos to boost our Instagram beauty. Next, during the checking phase, we relentlessly scan for external cues of acceptance or rejection. The third phase is responding phase. That's how we react after we take in the perceived cues. "Am I good?" "Do my sociometer plunge?" The FOPO cycle goes on and on. 

We can't get out of the cycle until we recognise that we are worthy exactly as our intrinsic virtue.We are not our grade. We are not our job, our age, our marathon time, our place on the organisation chart. Our value stems from our being, not our doing.