Your FOMO Is Trying to Tell You Something

I have a joke I like to make—though it’s not funny, and it’s not really a joke. Whenever I know I won’t be able to join my friends the next time they hang out, I make everyone promise to not have fun without me. Sometimes I have us go around in a circle so that each person can individually pledge to have a bad time. If I check in after my absence and ask how the night was, I expect a shrug, perhaps an assurance that It was fine, but you didn’t miss much. If someone says the time without me was great, I actually find that rude.

I don’t think I’m the center of the universe, nor do I want to get in the way of my friends’ happiness. No—I just have chronic FOMO: “fear of missing out.” I feel deeply haunted by the thought that if I don’t go to the party or the dinner or the coffee stroll, my one wild and precious life will be void of a joyful, transformative event—one I’d surely still be thinking about on my deathbed, a friend at my side tenderly holding my hand and whispering, Remember? That time we went bowling and the guy in the next lane over said that funny thing? Every year, my New Year’s resolution is to keep one night of the week free from social plans. Almost every week, I fail.

This is no way to live, you might be thinking. FOMO tends to be described as a dark impulse, something that keeps you from being present as you worry instead about what better option could be around the corner, or scroll miserably through the online evidence of what fun everyone is having without you. A quick Google search yields results nearly all about overcoming or dealing with or coping with the fear of missing out—usually by talking yourself out of it. But I suspect my FOMO may have served me well. Sometimes you need a little anxiety to push you into doing something positive. And if you don’t go on the hike or the beach trip or the roller coaster, you quite literally will miss out. Why are we all so set on pretending that’s not the case?

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When the author and speaker Patrick McGinnis coined the term FOMO, he didn’t consider the fear a sinister force. He was a wide-eyed business-school student from a small town, surrounded by intellectual, career, and social opportunities. He wanted to say yes to everything, he told me. Once, he tried to go to seven birthday parties in one night. Then 9/11 happened, and he felt an even greater urge to take advantage of every minute. FOMO was a sign of abundant potential—that he could learn, that he could have meaningful experiences, that each day might be different from the one before. “If you don’t believe there’s possibility,” he said, “why would you have FOMO?” The 2004 op-ed in which he named the phenomenon gently poked fun at his fellow business students madly juggling invites. He never guessed that more than a decade later, people would be talking about FOMO with such seriousness (nor, I imagine, studying it with grim rigor, publishing studies with titles such as “Fear of Missing Out, Need for Touch, Anxiety and Depression Are Related to Problematic Smartphone Use”).

The world has changed since 2004, though. Social media began feeding the feeling of always being left out of something. Optimization-and-productivity culture encouraged the idea that one can engineer their schedule to accommodate the ideal number of enlightening, spiritually fulfilling plans. Then, naturally, a backlash arrived. It might be best summed up by a newer term: JOMO, or the “joy of missing out.” The idea is that you should savor your solitude, fully embrace the choice to do what you want to do rather than what others are doing.

Sounds reasonable. And yet, as an introvert, I know that socializing often sounds unappealing before I actually start doing it. What I’m in the mood for isn’t a very good gauge of what I should do, or what future me will enjoy. (Let’s face it—she’s a stranger!) What is a helpful indicator is FOMO: whether I have the uneasy suspicion that if I do what’s comfortable, I might not undergo something that would have stretched me or brought me closer to people. Without it, I never would have jumped into the frigid ocean last February for a polar plunge, or gone camping in September with a group of more than 30 people, most of whom I didn’t know. I would never do anything after work, when I’m reliably exhausted.

That’s not to say you should run yourself into the ground trying to do everything. FOMO isn’t a master you need to obediently follow but, as McGinnis put it, a “tap on the shoulder” reminding you that your existence is transient and you need to decide how to spend it. He distinguishes between two types of FOMO. One is “aspirational FOMO,” which is when you identify an exciting or interesting experience—one that might make your life fuller. Simply imagining that potential reward can lead to the release of dopamine in the brain. The other is “herd FOMO,” which is the fear of getting left out of a collective encounter—a prospect so appalling that it can trigger a fight-or-flight response, complete with a rushing heartbeat and sweaty palms. “Part of the brain goes berserk,” McGinnis told me. He thinks that people should lean into the first type, the kind that’s about embracing possibility, not avoiding pain.

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Each time you act on aspirational FOMO, you get more data about what you enjoy, what matters to you, what’s worth making time for. In that sense, FOMO-driven action might lead you to feel less FOMO overall. Many college students, McGinnis said, fear missing out when they first arrive on campus—but this is what can lead them to meet people, discover interests, and ultimately have a better sense of what they don’t mind skipping. “When you’re 30 and somebody invites you to a bar and you’ve been to 4,000 bars,” he told me, “you have such perfect information about this thing that you can make a decision without even fretting.”

I am, admittedly, a FOMO extremist; on the precipice of turning 30, I still feel the need to go to the bar for the 4,001st time. Maybe that’s my herd FOMO talking. But I also think that I will never have enough data to know what any given night will be like. Every time, the conversation is a little different; every time, my knowledge of a friend is deepened or complicated, even if that change is barely perceptible. Every so often it turns out that someone really needed me there. The activity isn’t the point, after all; I’m not looking to stack my social résumé with pastimes that make it sound like I had fun. I’m trying to spend the time I have with people I love. And I do fear missing out on that.