FOMO? Give it time.

Germany versus Argentina. World Cup final.

And I was alone in a flat in Seville with a Schweppes tonic and the itchiest feet in the history of human suffering.

Outside the city was burning. Bars packed to the walls, the whole mad congregation of it. When you live in a Mediterranean old town, the neighbourhood can hear you breathe. A family's collective energy permeates through the brick.

I could feel the anticipation through the walls. And Spain weren't even fucking playing.

I'm football daft. United away days. Cardiff. Wembley. The whole glorious, catastrophic road of it, drugs and football and bone-crushing wake-ups. The three-day existential reckonings that followed you like a tuk-tuk driver in Cambodia.

And now this.

14 weeks sober. Sofa. Spain. Tonic water.

The road had stopped and I was sitting very still and the stillness was enormous.

The emptiness that night wasn't just about the drink. It was about the bloke I'd been. The one who was always moving, always in the thick of it, always the protagonist of some mental disaster.

That man was slowly chipping off. And I didn't know yet what was coming to replace him.

I sat with the not knowing. The tonic water got warm. Germany won. Yay.

FOMO isn't the fear of missing a good time.

It's the fear that without the drink, you are somehow less. Less alive. Less electric. Less the kind of person that exciting, mad shit happens to.

It's the road closing. The music stopping. The sense that everyone else is still moving and you are standing very still on a pavement somewhere, watching life happen around you.

It is a lie. But fuck me, it feels true in the early days.

Because your brain is still wired for the old life. Still trying to blag any reason to go back. And FOMO is its oldest trick.

Look at them all out there. Fucking lights, camera, action everywhere. Look what you're missing. Just one night. Just this once. The whole world is drinking but me. Oh, poor me…

It's not a feeling. It's a symptom. The last gasp of the man who needed a drink to survive a Tuesday, shitting yourself now that you don't.

That geezer isn’t right. He's just scared of dying completely.

Here's the truth about those monumental nights.

Mine were Cardiff. Wembley. Away days that became legend by Tuesday. Cup finals that exist now as mythology, growing wilder and more ludicrous with every telling.

Fragments. The first drink going down like the Hindenburg. The ubiquity, for a ten-year period, of Mr Fucking Brightside. The parkas. The swagger. The one-night stands. The chlamydia.

But here's the bit that matters. Yours were the same.

Different soundtrack. Different postcode. Different parka, maybe a different tribe entirely. Probably didn’t have trainers as slick as mine. But the same shape. The same nights that felt eternal and electric in the moment and then dissolved into black holes by morning. The same conviction that an all-mighty piss-up was the exact reason the human experience had been invented.

You don't remember most of yours either. Be honest.

You remember the first one going down. You remember a flash of somewhere in the middle where everything felt perfect. And then nothing. A gap where a whole night used to be, filled in later with some bullshit yarn you half made up to fill the silence. You cringed as the lies unfurled, didn’t ya?

You remember the passionate undressing of a stranger against their bedroom wall. But you can’t remember if you used a fucking condom or not.

When it comes to sense, the math ain’t mathing.

You were a man or a woman in a crowd, chemically mashed, moving through it like a ghost.

Performing joy rather than feeling it.

A tribute act to someone having a good time. You're not grieving the nights. You're grieving the fraud. 

Two and a bit years in. Barcelona. A night out with my ex and her Catalan friends. Good people, certainly not my people. People who moved through the world on a different frequency to the one I was learning to tune into.

Street festival in full flow. Everyone gulping Estrella Damm. Half of them double-dropping beans to make up for the half who weren't.

The music monstrous. The conversation going in circles the way conversation does when the chemicals are doing the talking.

Randoms telling me to lighten up. To dance. To shake my ass.

It's arse, thank you very much.

"You Brits are dry as fuck," they'd exclaim.

Well, this one here is a different kind of dry. The as-a-fucking-bone variety.

I stood there and looked around at all of it and the thought came quietly and completely.

I want to go home. I've got a good book on the go.

I looked at them. Gurning their faces off. Grinding against strangers with the glassy pharmaceutical certainty that this moment, right now, was the only moment that had ever mattered or ever would matter.

Every single one of you looks like a total bellend.

I wasn’t being snide, like. Not superior. Just the two years and a bit sober realisation that this was never the thing I was missing.

This was what it looked like up close. The dream from the outside. The reality from the inside.

People running from themselves. Loudly. Expensively. Together.

The roister-doistering road I'd been on for fifteen years was one full of sound and fury, arriving fucking nowhere.

I was done running. I wanted to go home and snuggle up with Eckhart Tolle. And that felt like freedom.

This is where people get all touchy and protective.

You've had your fucking run. You've had the parkas and the Hindenburg drinks and the chlamydia and the mornings you can't account for and the mythology you've spent years polishing in pubs. 

You've maxed it out, baby. You’re now polishing a turd.

There's no version of this where you get one more perfect night out of it. There's no secret final hurrah waiting for you that's going to be different from all the others. You already ran that experiment. Repeatedly. For years. You have the data. It’s compelling. I mean, look at your crow’s feet. You look fucked, mate.

So what do you actually want?

Do you want the fantasy of a party that stopped delivering a decade ago?

Or do you want your actual life? Your life. A life.

Tough shit either way, because you can't have both. Nobody gets both. That was never on the table.

Grieve it if you need to. Grieve it properly, with everything you've got. But grieve it and then let it go, because it's not coming back and it was never as good as you've decided to remember it. And who could trust your brain anyway? It’s been pickled to fuck.

Let it go. Not because you're weak. Because you're finished with it.

Can we give JOMO a bit of fucking love, please?

The Joy Of Missing Out.

The moment the whole thing flips. When you realise the sessions/sofa boozing you were so desperate not to miss isn't where any of the real living happens at all.

The real living is the Sunday morning that arrives fresh and full of possibility. The conversation you remember completely, every word of it, because you were actually present. Your daughter offering to make you a coffee without a disdainful sneer. The holiday where you come back genuinely changed rather than merely recovered.

The good book waiting at home.

That's not missing out.

That's the road opening up again. A different road. Your road. Finally.

Germany won 1-0. Gotze in extra time. 

I watched every single minute of it. Completely present. Completely sober. On my sofa in Seville with my flat tonic water and my itchy feet and the whole long quiet evening stretched out around me.

No blackout. No reconstruction. No black eye and an itchy crotch the next day.

Just a man and a football match and the whole of it remembered.

At the time, it felt like the end of something.

It was the beginning of everything.

The FOMO was a lie.

The presence was the whole point. 

And it will come. Christmas. New Year. Weddings. Festivals. Ordinary Fridays carrying the weight of the week.

Don't fight it. 

Just ask it one question:

"What am I actually afraid of missing?"

Because the honest answer, almost every time, is this:

The performance. The numbness. The version of yourself that didn't have to feel anything too clearly or for too long.

You can miss that. Grief is real. 

But don't mistake the grief for a reason to go back.

The road back is shorter than you think and longer than you can afford.

The road forward is where the real living is waiting. And you’ll be unlikely to catch chlamydia. Win win.

If GET TO MIDNIGHT. GO AGAIN. means something to you, it's on a sticker and a mug now.

Stick it on your laptop. Drink your morning coffee out of it. Let it remind you every single day.

Grab yours here

What's the one occasion you're still most afraid of sober? The one that still feels impossible without a drink?

Hit reply. I read every one.

GET TO MIDNIGHT. GO AGAIN.

Big love

Gary