FOMO vs. JOMO: The Battle of the Acronyms

We all know the feeling. It’s Friday night. The bars and clubs are hopping. Everyone’s dancing, drinking, and having a good time. You check your phone and see a post for a meetup at one of these places. The event looks exciting. But…on second thought…you’re also very tired and wouldn’t mind going to bed. What do you do?

I know. It seems quite absurd to outline this as a “problem.” The world is filled with starvation, poverty, political corruption, and warfare. The dilemma over whether to party or sleep seems far too petty and inconsequential to even consider. But…let’s look at it from another angle. The dilemma here isn’t so much “to drink/dance or not to drink/dance” as it is “to do one thing versus another.” It’s an existential question.

In modern parlance, we elegantly refer to the type of anxiety this dilemma produces as the “Fear of Missing Out” (FOMO). We look at photos of people on Facebook snorkeling in the Mediterranean or salsa-dancing in Argentina and, suddenly, our lives feel comparatively empty. The snorkeling and salsa-dancing, though, is usually only a tiny sliver of those people’s lives…the tiny sliver they decide to publicly share. The rest is filled with errands, chores, work schedules, and familial responsibilities. And, while social-media-fueled narcissism has driven many to share even the most mundane aspects of life, it isn’t very advisable to do so. We all take out the trash; we all clean the dishes.

In his 2021 book, 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, British/American journalist Oliver Burkeman debunks various modern philosophies on productivity and efficiency. As human beings we are all, of course, finite, mortal creatures, and none of us knows when we’ll die. Therefore, while planning and considering and preoccupying ourselves with the future is useful to some extent, it is ultimately futile. Planning really boils down to a phenomenon anchored in the present moment.

Burkeman further dispels any significance we give to our “to-do lists”. Do you have a long queue of Netflix movies and TV shows to watch? Books to read? Countries to travel to? Those types of lists can be fun to pursue, but, as Burkeman indicates, no one should expect to finish them because they are effectively infinite! It would take several dozen lifetimes (if not longer) to visit every significant place on earth or to complete every novel, and even those “definitive lists” that most of us produce are ultimately arbitrary and subjective. Maybe your Good-Reads account includes War and Peace and To Kill a Mockingbird, but it doesn’t include Don Quixote…or your Netflix queue includes Pulp Fiction but not Casablanca. Undoubtedly, it’s all just a matter of personal tastes and preferences.

Of course, the great “to-do list” and the “Fear of Missing Out” extend to matters far more serious than just Netflix and Good Reads. What about one’s career goals or the social/biological imperative to get married and have children? The “comparatively empty” feeling that virtually sharing one’s Caribbean photos produces in people pales in comparison to sharing one’s wedding and baby photos. Because women have more rigid biological clocks than men do, those who experience this type of dilemma typically experience it more acutely. But, rest assured, most of us who experience it- regardless of sex- experience it with some degree of severity.

So, what is the answer to this crushing existential crisis…this “fear of missing out”? The answer most productivity experts and motivational figures would give is simple: “Pull up your bootstraps and get to work! Those decks aren’t going to clear themselves, and those mountains aren’t going to climb themselves!” Okay. Fine. Fair enough. People should have goals, and people should be motivated to achieve those goals. But, as one guiding figure in my life put it, life goals should be like the “icing on the cake” …not the cake itself.

Your goal of visiting the Taj Mahal, after all, doesn’t mean much if, on your way to the airport, your car flips over and you suffer a fatal auto accident. Parents want to see their children grow up and flourish. They want to see their children have their own children. But sometimes, in the words of Lin-Manuel Miranda, the “unimaginable” occurs. Or…sometimes…people’s children simply don’t follow the path of having their own children. I’d like to double my salary, but it’s not something I can hasten towards.

And thus, we arrive at FOMO’s equally elegant but antithetical acronym—the “Joy of Missing Out” (JOMO). The “Joy of Missing Out” provides one of life’s greatest experiences—our un-burdening of the past and the future and our rekindling of the present moment. The present moment…that wonderful, treasured state of mind and the locus of proper attention every meditation expert encourages us to appreciate. The present moment may hinge upon a lifelong concatenation of occurrences and decisions, but it is all we have and all we ever really will have (that is, until we die). Furthermore, every decision we ever make we make by inevitably eschewing an infinite number of other options. If I decide to go bicycling or jogging, there’s a hundred bajillion alternative activities that I’m passing on by doing so.

Given our collective shortsightedness and eclectic array of fallibilities, it not hard to see why regrets about the past and anxieties about the future would often naturally follow. That is, of course, unless we can forgive ourselves and accept or even appreciate all the decisions we didn’t make. In other words, unless we can participate in the “Joy of Missing Out.” So tonight, I’m going to go to sleep instead of visiting the clubs (as appealing as they may sound), and I won’t feel like I missed much by making that decision.