Gordon Lightfoot

Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian singer-songwriter, has died at the age of 84.

Lightfoot’s passing gives me an occasion to mention a more general topic, which is how Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is in many ways the characteristic emotion of the Internet age.

Here’s the thing: After thinking on it, I realized the following:

(1) I’m familiar with a total of eight Gordon Lightfoot songs. I’ve never explored his music, been to a concert, or really known anything about him, beyond the fact that I could remember hearing eight of his songs. I mean I knew he was Canadian and he had a very cool name for a folk singer, so those are things I suppose.

(2) I really like all eight of those songs, and absolutely love several of them. The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald might be my all-time favorite ballad in any musical genre.

But I never got to know Lightfoot’s music, not really, because there’s too much stuff out there. And of course the Internet makes us constantly and acutely aware of this. Every time I see an allusion to Succession I realize oh there’s another of about 200 TV shows that I’ve never seen but really would like to see, but I have a marriage and children and a job and a blog and this or that particular political or intellectual topic I’m obsessing about at the moment, so I guess I’m just going to miss out, at least for now, and probably forever. And that’s the Internet, or one big feature of it anyway. (I realize the flip side is that I could go on YouTube and listen to Gordon Lightfoot’s music all day and that’s the flip side and that’s great, it really is, but that just sort of exacerbates the whole issue now doesn’t it?)