Nerd Processor

The Anxiety of Nerd FOMO

This golden age of nerd pop culture can be an exquisite torture for actual nerds

Rob Bricken
OneZero
Published in
7 min readMar 22, 2019

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Credit: Soloma_Poppystyle/iStock/Getty

IIt’s very likely first among first world problems, but there’s just too much good entertainment out there. It’s an actual dilemma, especially for geeks. Because even though we’re living in a golden age of nerd entertainment, the likes of which we never could have dreamed about as kids and teens, all that beautiful content is stressing us out.

Even if you’re just an average consumer of entertainment, you might feel like it’s impossible to check out everything you might be interested in — to watch every popular movie and great TV show, hear every hit album, read every critically acclaimed book and comic, play every lauded video game. You’re right — it is straight-up impossible. The only way to navigate this plethora of art is to become increasingly picky about how you spend your time and what you spend your time on.

Nerds don’t have more hours in the day than regular people, of course, but we often don’t have the luxury of being selective. Nerds are completists by nature, whether we want to collect the entire run of a comic book or all the action figures in a certain toy line or make sure to see every Star Wars product.

With so many new…

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Rob Bricken
OneZero

The former editor of io9.com, Rob Bricken has been a professional nerd since 2001. He also often cries at children's cartoons.