beating fomo during a partial solar eclipse
the real eclipse was the friends we made along the way
I heard about the total solar eclipse only two weeks before it happened, which was far too late to plan anything. Hotel rooms were scarce, and for the few remaining vacancies, they jacked up rates to criminal levels. I kept refreshing Booking.com until I snagged a room with a single bed, less than ideal for my group of four-ish. I prepared myself to sleep on a dirty carpet. For once, I wished I was part of a polycule. In this economy, a great way to save money is to sleep in a giant “cuddle pile.” Beds? Who needs those!
To avoid an overnight stay, we considered driving to Rochester on the Monday of the eclipse, which meant we needed to leave New York by 6 AM. But accounting for rush hour traffic, we’d need to leave at 5 AM. Oh, but also eclipse traffic…4 AM. On the way back, we’d be stuck bumper to bumper with the other million visitors, all of us trying to return our rental cars in time to avoid being price-gouged for another day. This was not going to be worth it at all, yet I felt that I desperately needed to be there. So I continued trying to gaslight myself into this trip.
The possibility of missing the total solar eclipse was the latest flare up of my chronic case of FOMO. In the past few years, I have worked to become less socially anxious, which is great, but now I want to rush into everything that I’ve missed. It is only exacerbated by living in NYC, where literally everything competes for your attention. Logically, I know that it is foolish to try to optimize your experiences to measure up to some cinematic standard of NYC life. You just gotta do what you wanna do. But with some media outlets dubbing the “Great American Eclipse” as the “celestial spectacle of the decade,” I felt pressured to participate in some deeply transformative moment.
The majority of people that I knew in NYC were staying put. But five people in my circles each had plans to travel upstate, and somehow five people became representative of the whole wide world. Once again, I was on the outside looking in. When I imagined the total solar eclipse, I did not visualize the sun but instead the sea of faces looking up at it. I imagined sharing eclipse glasses with a friend who forgot theirs and chatting it up with a stranger at a gas station who coincidentally lived on my block. All this is to say that I cared more about sharing the moment of the eclipse with people than the eclipse itself. FOMO for me is not a fear of missing out on an event, but a fear of missing out on connection.
Yet I also knew that a terrible travel experience paid at rip-off prices was going to kill my motivation. The iconic phrase is “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,”1 but I’ve learned through a few trials and many errors that actually I will die if I don’t sleep. I can’t “do it for the plot” if I am in a plot of dirt (dead). When my group came to similar conclusions, I was relieved. But even as I texted a few friends with plans to ditch work and watch the eclipse in Brooklyn Botanical Garden, I was disappointed that my vision for my eclipse experience would go unfulfilled.
On a whim, I remembered a poetry class I went to last year. In it, we analyzed Gil Scott-Heron’s spoken word poem “Whitey On the Moon.”
As you can guess from the title, it captures the dichotomy between the futuristic ambition of the Apollo moon landing and the stagnant reality of the Black working class. Though you have to listen to the narration and conga drums to fully appreciate his genius, here is an illustrative quote:
I can't pay no doctor bills
But whitey's on the moon
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still
While whitey's on the moon
The man just upped my rent last night
Cause whitey's on the moon
No hot water, no toilets, no lights
But whitey's on the moon
Much like the moon landing, the spectacle of this eclipse was out of reach for so many. For the million people traveling upstate to New York, tens of millions of people were staying put, many of them because they had to. The moon could block out the sun but it was not going to block out your rent bill or the stingy boss from breathing down your neck. I thought of all the workers who would be stuck indoors, of the incarcerated who would still be locked up, except for the six who sued and wonderfully won their rights to see the eclipse. A friend of mine, who is an excellent sex educator, was forced to stay indoors with her students as some sort of baffling classroom punishment.
It isn’t a particularly novel revelation that the barriers to an activity will be greater for people with fewer resources. But I needed to be reminded of it to get some perspective. I seem to forget that life rarely pans out how you expect it, but the reason I forget is because of my privileges. Instead of leaning into the discomfort of my disappointment, I had the option to buy my way out of it. Though I don’t like how this term is thrown about haphazardly to describe literally anything bad, in this case, this reflex does feel like a function of capitalism.
Tending to disappointment can be quite healing. Once I divorced myself of a singular narrative and its hefty price tag, I could be grateful for all that I actually had. On the day of the eclipse, it was a beautiful sunny spring day in Brooklyn. We spread picnic blankets over a luscious patch of grass in the garden, creating a comfy little island amidst an archipelago of families and friend groups.
Though we were not in the path of totality, 90% of the sun did get covered. The sky darkened, and I heard a gasp or two from the audience. We snacked on carrots and hummus, and clapped for the sun like, yes girl, you can do it! A bespectacled ten-year-old-ish boy with the accent of a seventy-year-old Brooklynite shouted, “Oh my god, I absolutely love physics!”
Watching the total solar eclipse would’ve been cool. I hope I get to see it at some point in the future. Though my eclipse experience was not the one I had imagined, I loved it all the same. I realized I was not on the outside. I was just elsewhere, still under the same sun, connected to the people around me.
And I want what I have for everyone else. I want us all to be free from shitty bosses and merciless systems, so that we can all experience disappointment and connection - the nature of being a human - on our own terms.
I learned that this phrase was coined by Warren Zevon. Good song.