The FOMO of My Own Potential (and the Infinite-Option Hangover)

Yesterday I left a coffee with a twenty-two-year-old who’s building a vernacular AI tutor on WhatsApp, walked into a call with a solo founder shipping an agent that fills NBFC onboarding forms while you blink, and opened Instagram to a college kid selling ₹499 Notion templates like hot samosas. Ten minutes later I was staring at my wall feeling… small. Not insecure exactly more like vertigo. Before my master’s, the plan was clean: become a self-sufficient counselling psychologist, do the hours, stack the cases, build a practice. Now, every conversation detonates a fresh alternative: build a product, start a studio, be a creator, join a pre-seed team, do a PhD, launch a cohort… I have time, I have money to float experiments, I’m not allergic to risk and somehow I can’t choose a door. It’s not laziness; it’s ambition vertigo.

Psych has a vocabulary for this nausea. Barry Schwartz called it the paradox of choice too many options reduce satisfaction. Add maximizer bias (the urge to pick the “best” path) and anticipated regret (the fear you’ll hate yourself later), and you get my current browser: 47 tabs titled “maybe.” I meet one more dazzling human and feel my goalposts sprint down the field. Talk to a Web3 guy building a micro-SaaS in three weekends and I think, “Wow, my dream is provincial.” Talk to a school founder designing mental-health programs for teenagers and I think, “Forget everything; this is the real work.” By dinner, I’ve switched ambitions four times without taking a single step.

AI has turned this into a 24/7 carnival. With a decent laptop and Wi-Fi, I can spin up a prototype, train a tiny model on my own corpus, generate landing pages, edit a podcast, and publish a micro-course before lunch. There are open syllabi for almost any skill. You can go from “I wonder if I could…” to “I shipped version 0.1” in forty-eight hours. The abundance is beautiful and brutal. I don’t just fear missing out on parties anymore; I fear missing out on versions of me. Psychologists call them possible selves the mental cast of who you might become. My cast list has turned into an Avengers crossover: Therapist-Me, Founder-Me, Researcher-Me, Creator-Me, Professor-Me. Each one tugs at my sleeve like a kid in a toy store.

Then there’s the exploration–exploitation problem (hello, reinforcement learning). Do you keep trying new levers hoping for a better jackpot, or do you double down on the lever that pays reliably? Startups call it “finding product-market fit.” I call it “my life is a multi-armed bandit and my epsilon is stuck at 0.9.” Every time I try to “exploit” say, double down on the therapy practice plan someone shows me a shiny exploration lever: an AI clinic intake tool I could build, a podcast I could host, a fellowship I could apply to. I pull the new lever. It makes a nice ding. I feel clever. I end the week emotionally broke.

Some of this is FOBO (Fear of Better Options). Some of it is its newer cousin I’m coining FOPU—Fear Of Picking Uncool. In the era of build-in-public and overnight ARR screenshots, it’s easy to confuse status for substance. One friend raised a tiny pre-seed and my brain went, “Funding equals real.” Another friend, who quietly sees ten clients a week and changes lives, earns less applause online but leaves deeper footprints. I know this. And still the amygdala likes the shiny graphs.

Self-learning paradox, too: I can audit MIT, Stanford, and a dozen indie courses from my bed. But a bigger library can actually shrink the reading. It’s option discovery cost you don’t just choose between A and B; you spend hours proving to yourself that choices C through Z exist. I’ll research “best vector DBs for psych notes,” discover five libraries, then lose a day benchmarking tools for a product I haven’t even committed to building. It’s productive avoidance in a lab coat.

Here are the scenes that really mess with my head (and heart):

• A teenager from Jaipur cold-DMs me a Figma of an anxiety-tracking app in Hinglish, ships the MVP on Glide, and gets 1,000 users in a week because she hustled in school WhatsApp groups. I clap, I grin, and a small voice whispers, “So what exactly is your excuse?”

• A two-person studio in Goa uses off-the-shelf LLMs to triage customer emails for a D2C brand; their founder waters tomatoes on his balcony between deployments. I love that version of life so much I consider moving.

• A speech therapist on YouTube turns her clinic protocols into downloadable kits and pays her rent from Gumroad, one parent at a time. It’s tiny and holy.

• A cousin’s friend in London runs a peer-support circle for immigrant students on Sunday evenings. No app, no VC, just chairs in a room. Somehow that feels like the most “venture scale” thing I’ve seen all month—if you measure scale as soul per square foot.

On bad days, these examples make me feel stupid like I’m the only one in the room still drawing wireframes in pencil while everyone else is minting momentum. On good days, they remind me of a subtler concept: self-determination theory. Humans thrive when three needs are met autonomy, competence, relatedness. Optionality gives autonomy; practice builds competence; cohorts give relatedness. If I chase all three daily, I feel alive. When I doom-scroll founders and forget to touch any of the three, I feel like a spectator at my own life.

So what to do when the buffet is infinite and the appetite is finite? I’m resisting the urge to design another 47-point system.

Instead, I’m stealing a page from bandit algorithms and setting a season of exploration time-boxed, guilt-free, with a visible end date. For the next six weeks, I’m sampling: one micro-build in AI (an intake note summariser for therapists), one live experiment in community (a monthly salon for psychology + product folks), and one deep-craft practice (long-form case writing). At the end, I’ll force a directional decision not forever, but for a year. Naval’s line “direction > speed” is written on a sticky note above my desk for a reason. You can course-correct a moving vehicle; you cannot steer a parked car.

I’m also trying option caps. Three simultaneous bets, max. Every new idea must audition for a slot by killing an existing one. This sounds harsh; it’s merciful. It cures the disease I call portfolio-of-selves bloat owning ten tiny identities, starving them all, and calling it “keeping doors open.”

And I’m borrowing a therapy tactic: values over outcomes. When I feel lost in the startup/creator/clinic kaleidoscope, I ask, “Which choice serves care, clarity, and craft?” If a path feeds two of those three, it’s probably right for me even if it’s less sexy on Twitter. That question is my spam filter for hype. It’s hard to feel stupid when you’re aligned.

Optionality is a gift; so is narrowing. The fear that I’m “thinking too small” is really the fear of leaving a version of me unlived. Maybe the trick is to keep a museum of those possible selves honour them with weekend sketches, coffees, and prototypes while committing to one living exhibit for the year. You can love the others without adopting them.

Last thing I’m learning: new rooms reset your brain. Every time I sit with founders, I feel late. Every time I sit with clinicians, I feel anchored. Every time I sit with teenagers, I feel useful. The data points matter. If your calendar only exposes you to people sprinting a different race, you’ll misread your own pace as failure. Curate the cohort the way you curate your feed.

So, yes I have time, money, and appetite. I also have a nervous system that prefers one clear “why” over fifteen shiny “what ifs.” Today, my potential’s FOMO is not a problem to solve; it’s a weather report to carry an umbrella through. I’ll explore on purpose, decide on deadline, and let the other versions of me cheer from the balcony instead of hijacking the steering wheel. If the world is truly small, I’ll run into them again in a different season, in a different city, when the direction changes and the next door is actually mine to open.