JOMO

Where the term comes from

First came FOMO. Patrick McGinnis, then a Harvard Business School student, wrote about “FOMO” in a 2004 op-ed in the school paper, and the phrase “fear of missing out” had been used in marketing before that (Wikipedia). Social media turned it into a daily feeling: your feed is a live stream of every party you weren’t at.

JOMO is the flip side. On July 19, 2012, writer and technologist Anil Dash published a post called “JOMO!”. After his son was born he had been mostly offline, and he found he hadn’t missed anything that mattered. He argued that skipping things can be a choice that brings contentment rather than a loss. He didn’t claim to have invented the phrase, but his post is what made it spread.

Why FOMO usually wins

Feeds show you what others are doing right now, curated to look good, and imply you’ll fall behind if you look away. Researchers found FOMO was linked to lower mood and lower life satisfaction, and to checking social media at bad moments. The research is correlational.

FOMO also traps groups, not just individuals. In a large study of US college students, economists found many would need to be paid to quit TikTok or Instagram on their own, yet would actually pay for everyone to quit together. Leaving alone feels like missing out. Leaving together feels like relief.

How to tell if FOMO is running you

• You check stories from an event you chose not to go to.
• You keep your phone face-up at dinner “in case”.
• Your phone comes with you to the bathroom.
• A quiet Saturday feels like failing, not resting.

How to practise JOMO

Choose in advance. Decide what you’re doing tonight and what you’re skipping. Missing out by choice feels very different from missing out by accident.

Shrink the window. Students who limited Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat to 10 minutes each per day for three weeks reported feeling less lonely than a control group. It was a small study, and the authors say there’s nothing magic about the exact number.

Mute, don’t just leave. Archive the group chats that buzz all evening and switch off “someone posted” alerts. You’ll still see it later, on your schedule.

Protect one phone-free block. A phone-free morning schedule in Bricked turns feed apps to brick until the time you choose, so the first hour of the day is yours.

Check what you missed afterward. Usually it’s nothing. Noticing that is what JOMO is made of. It’s also the “happily miss out” in digital minimalism.