My mom, scrolling through Facebook on a lazy December morning, looked up at me and asked, “What does ‘FOMO’ mean?”
“It means fear of missing out,” I replied. She nodded ambivalently and kept scrolling.
It started me thinking, though, about the phrase and how my peers and I use it. My mom had seen it on one of my Facebook photos from our family’s vacation—a friend of mine had commented ‘FOMO’ on a photo of me sitting on a beach. I also hear ‘FOMO’ tossed around frequently in conversations on campus among my peers. “I was tired but I went to the party anyways. If I didn’t I would have had too much FOMO.” We use ‘FOMO’ lightheartedly in person and on social media.
But as I began to think more carefully, I realized how pervasive and profound this fear is, at least for me. The fear of missing out motivates so many of my daily actions. Sometimes, I think this is a good thing. FOMO motivates me to get out of my bed in the winter when I’m cold and feeling lazy. It has motivated me to try new things and find new passions. It makes me seize the day.
But the fear of missing out can also be problematic. As I thought about my own experiences with FOMO, I realized that I sometimes forfeit my own preferences to partake in whatever ‘the group’ is doing when I have FOMO. For example, I often find myself at my school’s basketball games even though I don’t particularly care for basketball due to FOMO. I know I will feel sad if I see Facebook photos of my friends at the game without me.
People of my mom’s generation do not experience FOMO in the same intense way that we do. When my mom heard the phrase FOMO, she didn’t seem to have any interest in adding it to her own vocabulary. She doesn’t have FOMO of being left out of an Instagram. We, however, have more FOMO and have it more frequently, because we are constantly connected. We are on Facebook 24/7, which means that we are constantly exposed to the possibility of feeling like we are missing out on something.
A recent University of Michigan study found that, the more people use Facebook, the worse they feel. It’s easy to feel sad about your own life when you are sitting in bed in pajamas, and your Facebook and Instagram feeds show friends posting photos and videos of them travelling, skydiving, swimming with dolphins, or going to parties that you weren’t invited to.
The fact is, though, that every single day, you miss out on something. You could be having a candlelit dinner at the top of the London Eye, and still be missing out on some other incredibly experience. Yes, FOMO can be a good motivator. But it’s important to not let fear of missing out on something you don’t have keep you from appreciating all that you do have.
