The plague, which first broke out in earnest in Europe in the 1600s, caused mass deaths across the world and only began to be eradicated some 300 years later, thanks to advances in medicine. The mass deaths that occurred in medieval England and France kept the plague as the world's most talked-about medical phenomenon right up until just 30 years before the internet appeared. Doctors carried out years of research into the plague, and its last known trace was found in Madagascar in the 1950s. Although it hasn't been seen on a mass scale since, it wouldn't be wrong to say it has handed its baton over to another disease — one that doesn't kill: FOMO…

As advances in medicine nearly doubled human lifespan across much of the world over the last 100 years, the "short, mortal life" gave way to a "long, immortal life" opened up by "technology" — a life that broke away, in temporal terms, from the notion of life as a test imposed by "theology."

The digital life, or virtual world — whatever you want to call it — brought about by the technology age's endless possibilities, opened the door to the internet, which entered our lives passively in the 80s and, in the years that followed, began to become life itself. As the 90s came to a close, people slowly began surrendering basic life needs and reasons for social contact — shopping online, meeting new people, paying bills — to an endless, lazy way of life, and by the 2000s they'd started getting acquainted with the phenomenon of "social media." For many people, this development came to be accepted as the one remaining reason to go outside at all, and it satisfied the need for "self-actualisation" — regarded, in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, as the most luxurious of all needs — introducing the world to a capsule form of self-gratification, where writing posts on a blog would do the job just as well as standing on a podium and stating your views on any subject to win other people's approval. The manifestos, novels, announcements and decrees once written with quill and inkwell in medieval Europe could now be written on keyboards that lay their letters out before us, and shared with the whole world without ever needing the post.

In the recent period when ideas incubated "in a garage in America" in the early years of the 20th century started, one by one, to be put into practice, new social platforms had already become intricately woven into our lives. Social media, which could once have been seen as a golden key to self-actualisation, has today become a vast arena where you can watch other people's self-actualisation unfold in real time.

Today, thanks to the concept of "stalking" — the modern version of the urge to follow other people's lives — we can follow anyone we like's life from a distance without being branded a deviant. There's no doubt that if we'd tried, in the past, to do the "stalking" we now do so comfortably in this technology-driven age of laziness, we'd have faced a public flogging in the Arabian Peninsula, the guillotine in the West, or being thrown to the lions in Africa. Because people living in the past neither exposed their private lives to this extent, nor went about their daily lives carelessly with their curtains flung wide open.

"Fear of missing out" — or FOMO, as it's more widely known in its short form — refers to the deep anxiety felt when the following habit that people in the technology age have built up becomes impossible, because internet access, the other party in the communication, is interrupted. Though it has no power to kill, this widespread anxiety, which spreads fast, has placed social media, and the internet in general, into the category of basic needs — making this endless technological ocean, and the armadas sailing on it (that is, the companies), even more immortal.

We can't know for certain whether this addiction was factored into the design of social media platforms, but it's worth knowing that these monsters, whose growth we ourselves have played a large part in, are closer to us than the blood in our veins, or even the plague virus that once mixed with that blood.

Now that you've finished reading this article, go and check your Facebook notifications, tweets and Instagram posts — because "your lot" got together at some venue yesterday, and you weren't there.