The nagging sense of being out of tune with the web’s dominant emotional wavelength is starting to feel familiar. So much has been written about the new ways we mourn, in public, in the era of social media — no, really, I mean a huge amount. But less has been written about the curious inverse phenomenon that has arisen as a consequence: the experience of not mourning when everyone else seems to be doing so.

By the time I learnt of the death of Terry Pratchett last Thursday, the internet was already roiling with expressions of grief and affection. I was on the point of joining in, tweeting to express how sad I was, when a realisation dawned: I wasn’t truly sad. I’ve never read any of Pratchett’s books, and was only vaguely aware of his role as a dementia research campaigner. You’d have to be a monstrous cynic to doubt the sincerity of the responses to Pratchett’s death, from friends and fans alike. But me? I was roughly as grief-stricken as I suspect David Cameron was when he announced that he was “sad to hear” the news, which is to say: not actually sad at all.

It’s strange that this should feel a bit shameful to admit. After all, I haven’t read the work of most culturally significant authors, and neither have you; everyone’s individual galaxy of personally important public figures is unique, and nobody has the bandwidth to mourn every newsworthy person who deserves it.

The list of famous people whose deaths, in the last year or so have left me feeling authentically bereft for more than a few minutes is short: Philip Seymour Hoffman. The list of those whose deaths shocked me is a little longer, and includes, among others, Robin Williams. But there are any number of other celebrities whose deaths provoked an online outpouring of emotion that left me sympathising with Sara Ivry, who wrote in Tablet magazine in the aftermath of Williams’ suicide: ... I cannot for the life of me summon up the public, almost performative grief others seem to access so readily. I ask myself, besides my friends and family, whose death would so move me to such a widespread declaration of emotion? Has social media so hardened me?

Compelling explanation

Personally, I don’t think it’s that people like Ivry or me have grown unfeeling. An equally compelling explanation for being unable to summon the grief displayed by others is the same as the one behind the “fear of missing out”. Social media exposes us to far more opportunities for fleeting social interactions with far more people at a “low cost of admission” than ever before; those interactions are disproportionately likely to involve the emotional high and low points of their lives. It’s fairly obvious that seeing other people’s good fortune might lead to FOMO and “Facebook envy”. But this same set of online circumstances means that if, any subculture in your extended network is grieving a significant death, you’ll hear plenty about it from those who care... and you won’t hear, naturally enough, from all those who remain unmoved.

(For the record, I’m not sure there’s anything so bad about “performative grief”, either. It’s undoubtedly true that some mourners on social media seem to want to make the story all about them, but this is true of so much human behaviour that singling out the grieving fans of an actor or author seems rather harsh.)

None of this emotional FOMO applies exclusively to grief. Another familiar experience these days is that of watching an explosion of online nostalgia precipitated by the anniversary of a movie or album that happened not to play a formative role in your early life. It’s happening right now, in fact, for those of us who feel neutral about the 30th anniversary of The Breakfast Club. As with Terry Pratchett, this sense of being on the outside looking in implies no antipathy; I’d probably adore The Breakfast Club had I encountered it at the right age, and one day I may well regret not having started sooner on the Discworld books. If anything, watching from the sidelines is salutary: the realisation that the inner lives of your acquaintances can be so different to your own is encouraging evidence that social networks aren’t simply echo chambers. It can be fascinating — moving, even — to discover what moves others.

There is, though, a related but much more fraught phenomenon: the experience of watching your social networks rhapsodise about an artist with whose work you are familiar, and whom you have tried hard to like, but just can’t. This can be highly disorienting, leading you to question the judgements of your closest friends or your own ability to recognise excellence when you see it. I suggest we call this The David Foster Wallace effect. But it is a topic for another day.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd