The Fear of Missing Old

I reach for the bottle opener in my parents’ kitchen and notice the slightly worn off metal on the outer edges. This simple tool has been popping bottle caps for sixty years. And yet it is just as reliable today as it was back then. 

It is however an oddity. How many objects do we possess that are more than a decade old? 

Our consumption habits are based on the idea that new is better, more adapted to the current context.  

Our shiny new object syndrome manifests itself beyond the material realm. It seems to be very much at play when we decide which ideas to consume. 

Back when I was doing research in college, I would systematically skip the older journal articles and books. Anything older than two years felt like I was going to miss out on the latest piece of academic wisdom. For a long time, the “latest releases” section would be my first stop when I stepped into my favorite bookshop. I’d think, surely the most contemporary piece of thinking is the sharpest lens to make sense of the world. 

But is there really a correlation between a book or an idea’s recency and its ability to illuminate us on the present? 

I came across a theory that I found particularly helpful to answer this question. It’s called the Lindy effect. It says that the future life-expectancy of anything that’s non-perishable like ideas or technology depends on their current age. In other words something that resisted the test of time is likely to be around for another while. 

In his book “Antifragile” Nicholas Nassim Taleb uses the Lindy effect to assess the worthiness of a book:

So I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth.  

From that perspective, reading anything that just came out makes no sense at all. You’ll have to let time be the judge of anything that gets published. 

Here’s a fun experiment you can do to test out how “Lindy” your reading habits are. Go to your Goodreads page and click on “My books” > “Stats” > “Publication Year”. I was quite surprised to see how biased I was towards reading things that have been published within the last 50 years. 

A snapshot of what I read by publication date.

And if you’re a huge Goodreads nerd like me, perhaps you’ll enjoy the fact that they’ve curated a list of the best books by century from the 4th to the 21st.

You might think twice about picking your next read from the New York Times’ “best books of the year” list when you realize you’ve got about 1,600 years of tried-and-tested thinking to catch up on. Perhaps that when it comes to books, FOMO should really stand for Fear of Missing Old.