FOMO

While perhaps not classified in the diagnostic manuals as a formal “neurosis”, the fear of missing out can certainly feel like one. How else to label the constant rumination about others having better experiences that it distracts you from engaging in your own so-called life? So-called, that is, when such distractions themselves become a pseudo-life defined by compulsive social-media checking and chronic over commitments that ironically remove you from the very life you were worried about missing out on? Vicarious highlight reels indeed.

Though the FOMO term was only coined in 2004, the worry about one’s quieter life as lesser or that others are having richer, more exciting lives is the theme of classic literature, including some of the works we’d addressed in our earlier book club (forerunner to Member Mondays) e.g. The Great Gatsby, where FOMO was coded as class, glamour, and lost love. Our sister discussion group Notes From The Underground (led by Jeremy Ciampa) focused on Dostoevsky’s FOMO-like feelings that showed up as haunted regret, the fear of wasted life, and the torment of paths not taken.

We then have the delicious satire of H.L. Mencken who addresses the puritanical anxiety of those repressive elders or clergy in the 18th and 19th-century novels who police pleasure, dance, and drinking because they have the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time” – just as FOMO drives compulsive checking and social-media monitoring.

All of which leads to the focus article (click: What If This Is It?) which provides a different perspective on the “fear of missing out.” Perhaps missing out in some regard is the point of living at all. “What if missing out isn’t a failure of optimisation but a condition of being human? What if the very fact that we cannot have everything is what makes anything matter at all? Scarcity isn't always the enemy of meaning – it’s the condition that can make meaning possible.”

To which we might further ask, what is the opposite of FOMO? It might be JOMO i.e. the joy of missing out, while another might be labeled with this newly-coined FOBI i.e. the fear of being included, though JOMO and FOBI would themselves seem to be polar opposites given the differences in the underlying emotional roots.

Please note the following RSVP Policy for Member Monday: RSVP sign-up opens up at 11:00am on Fridays via the City Club weekly Newsletter. Seats are first-come, first-served: the first 14 secure a spot at the table, the last 3 on the couch. Cancellations must be made 24 hours in advance or the standard Social Lunch rate applies.