Angela Wang 
Imagine having a comfortable day on the weekend, watched a movie, read a book, and cuddled with your dog. Your phone is right beside you, facing down, and you turned down all the notifications to avoid this perfect night from being ruined. But soon, you feel a wave of anxiety. You know something feels wrong. You flip your phone over and see all your friends posting about a party they went to. You scroll through all your friends’ social media and find posts of different angles and different people, but it’s all the same party. You feel a rush of anxiety of missing out at the party, where all your friends are at.
We call the anxiety of feeling left out the “Fear of Missing Out” or FOMO. We make it sound like a personal flaw or individual insecurity. When that familiar, hollow feeling hits us when we scroll through a friend’s vacation posts, we tend to look at ourselves as overly social or weak-willed.
However, FOMO isn’t something that we catch, it’s something that we produce when we see certain things. The FOMO factory is build upon social media, it’s controlled by algorithms of desire to connect and belong with others. The anxiety that we continue to produce keeps us to keep on scrolling through our phone and comparing with others.
Social media presents us with peak life moments. We would usually see graduations, vacations, and social gathering that would make a normal day seem like a failure. These posts we see online makes exceptional experiences seem standard.
Social media platform identifies a desire that we have, a desire for connection and succession. On these platforms, we can see others fulfilling that desire in ideal ways. The gap between reality and that desire generates FOMO.
However, there is a way to rebel against FOMO. It’s called the Joy of Missing Out (JOMO). It’s the practice of finding peace and satisfaction by intentionally choosing to miss out. JOMO is deepening personal experience rather than focusing on a desire to be successful. With JOMO, we can enjoy the freedom of a weekend afternoon without worrying about being productive. JOMO reclaims the worth of inner life that prioritizes the significance of interior life.
JOMO offers a liberation that FOMO obscures, the freedom to define your own enough. JOMO is a choice to free yourself from comparison, it also makes you realize that a “rich life” is being measured by the depth of your presence.
