Fear of missing out

Based on Wikipedia: Fear of missing out

Here's something peculiar about modern life: you can be sitting at a perfectly nice dinner with friends you genuinely enjoy, and still feel a gnawing anxiety that somewhere else, something better is happening without you. That nagging sensation has a name now. We call it the Fear of Missing Out, or FOMO, and it has become one of the defining psychological conditions of our hyperconnected age.

But FOMO isn't actually new. It's an ancient human anxiety dressed up in digital clothing.

The Phrase That Launched a Thousand Hashtags

The acronym FOMO entered our vocabulary thanks to a Harvard Business School student named Patrick McGinnis. In 2004, he wrote an op-ed for the school's magazine, The Harbus, with the gloriously academic title "Social Theory at HBS: McGinnis' Two FOs." In it, he described two fears that seemed to dominate his classmates' social lives: FOMO and its lesser-known sibling, FOBO—the Fear of a Better Option.

McGinnis was describing the particular anxiety of ambitious young people surrounded by other ambitious young people, all of whom seemed to be doing impressive things at all hours. Should you attend this networking event or that party? Study for the exam or join the startup pitch session? Every choice felt like it might be the wrong one.

The phrase caught fire. It jumped from Harvard's hallways to social media hashtags to the pages of The New York Times. But McGinnis didn't invent the underlying feeling—he just gave it a catchy name.

Before FOMO, There Were the Joneses

Long before anyone had a smartphone, people experienced something similar. Your grandparents might have called it "keeping up with the Joneses"—that compulsive need to match your neighbors' possessions and lifestyle. If the family next door bought a new car, suddenly your perfectly functional sedan felt inadequate.

The difference between keeping up with the Joneses and modern FOMO is one of scale. Your grandparents had to keep up with maybe a dozen families on their street. You have to keep up with hundreds of acquaintances posting the highlight reels of their lives in real time, plus celebrities, plus influencers, plus that one person from high school who somehow seems to vacation in the Maldives every other month.

Marketing strategist Dan Herman actually identified this fear in the late 1990s, before social media made it epidemic. He noticed that consumers were driven by an "ambition to exhaust all possibilities"—a desire to try every new brand and experience because missing out on even one felt unbearable. Herman saw this in focus groups about product choices. He had no idea what was coming.

What Social Media Did to Your Brain

Social media didn't create FOMO. But it poured gasoline on what was previously a small campfire.

Think about what platforms like Instagram and Facebook actually are: endless streams of curated highlights from other people's lives. Nobody posts about their boring Tuesday evening eating leftover pasta alone. They post about the incredible restaurant, the surprise birthday party, the spontaneous road trip. Every scroll through your feed is a parade of experiences you're not having.

This creates a peculiar distortion. You're comparing your complete life—the mundane moments, the quiet nights in, the ordinary days—to everyone else's greatest hits. It's like comparing your behind-the-scenes footage to their theatrical trailer.

The numbers are striking. Surveys show that nearly forty percent of people between ages twelve and sixty-seven say social media has increased their fear of missing out. Among millennials—those born roughly between 1981 and 1996—the proportion is even higher. This generation grew up as social media came of age, and they carry its psychological fingerprints.

The Psychology Underneath

Why does missing out feel so bad? The answer lies in some fundamental truths about human psychology.

Psychologists talk about something called self-determination theory, which identifies three basic psychological needs that all humans share: competence (feeling capable), autonomy (feeling in control of your choices), and relatedness (feeling connected to others). When these needs aren't being met, we feel worse. And here's the key finding: people who report lower satisfaction in these areas also report higher levels of FOMO.

In other words, FOMO isn't random anxiety. It's a signal that something feels off in your psychological foundation. If you feel disconnected from others, or uncertain about your choices, or doubtful of your abilities, FOMO rushes in to fill that void with a specific worry: maybe there's something better out there that you're not part of.

This explains why the fear doesn't go away when you check social media—it often gets worse. You're looking for reassurance about your place in the social world, but what you find is more evidence of things happening without you. It's like scratching a mosquito bite: temporarily satisfying, ultimately counterproductive.

The Cascade of Consequences

FOMO doesn't stay neatly contained as a passing feeling. It spills over into behavior, sleep, relationships, and mental health.

Start with the obvious: FOMO drives more social media use, which increases FOMO, which drives more social media use. This feedback loop can become genuinely problematic. People check their phones during meals with friends. They scroll through Instagram while supposedly watching a movie with their partner. There's even a word for this behavior now: phubbing, a portmanteau of "phone" and "snubbing." You're physically present with someone but mentally absent, snubbing them in favor of your device.

Sleep suffers too. Multiple studies have found a negative correlation between FOMO and hours of sleep. This makes intuitive sense—if you're afraid of missing out, you stay up later checking what's happening. On college campuses especially, social life peaks at night, which means FOMO-prone students sacrifice rest to maintain their fear-driven vigilance.

The mental health picture is grimmer still. Research consistently links FOMO to higher rates of anxiety and depression. A 2013 study found that FOMO negatively impacts mood, life satisfaction, self-esteem, and mindfulness. Another study on college students showed that experiencing FOMO on a given day predicted higher fatigue that same day. When FOMO persists throughout a semester, students report significantly elevated stress.

There's something darkly ironic here. FOMO is, at its core, a fear of social exclusion. But the behaviors it drives—constant phone checking, surface-level social maintenance, distracted presence—can actually damage the deep relationships that would provide genuine belonging.

The Video Game Trap

FOMO has found particularly fertile ground in video games, and the reasons are instructive.

Modern multiplayer games often include limited-time events, seasonal passes, and exclusive items that are only available for brief windows. Miss the event, and you miss the reward forever. Game designers understand this creates powerful motivation—players log in regularly not because they're having fun, but because they're afraid of what they'll lose by not playing.

There's a social dimension too. In many games, rare cosmetic items—special character skins, unique weapons, exclusive gear—signal to other players that you were there, you participated, you're a dedicated member of the community. Having these items is social currency. Lacking them can feel like wearing last season's fashion to a party where everyone notices.

This isn't accidental. Game companies have refined these mechanics deliberately, understanding that FOMO drives engagement more reliably than enjoyment does. The battle pass system, which offers a limited-time ladder of rewards that require regular play to complete, is essentially weaponized FOMO.

When FOMO Meets Finance

Perhaps nowhere has FOMO proved more dangerous than in investment markets, particularly cryptocurrency.

The crypto space is rife with stories of people who got rich seemingly overnight. Bitcoin's early adopters. Ethereum believers. Holders of whatever meme coin happened to explode that week. Each success story creates a wave of FOMO among those who weren't invested, who now fear they're missing the next opportunity.

This fear has been ruthlessly exploited. "Pump and dump" schemes work by artificially inflating a cryptocurrency's price—often through social media hype and influencer endorsements designed to trigger FOMO—then selling at the peak while later investors hold worthless assets. Because cryptocurrency regulation remains murky in many jurisdictions, these manipulations often occupy a legal grey area. The influencers stoking fear of missing out face few consequences; their followers face empty wallets.

Traditional stock markets aren't immune either. When markets trend upward, FOMO pushes investors to buy not because they've analyzed the fundamentals, but because they can't stand the thought of watching others profit while they sit on the sidelines. This is part of what economists call the bandwagon effect—the tendency to do something primarily because others are doing it.

The bandwagon effect is FOMO's close cousin. You might not understand why everyone's buying a particular stock or joining a particular platform or wearing a particular brand. You might not even agree that it's worthwhile. But the fear of being left out overrides your independent judgment.

FOMO as Marketing Strategy

Advertisers have understood FOMO's power for decades, even before we had a name for it.

Consider AT&T's "Don't be left behind" campaign. The message wasn't about technical specifications or price comparisons. It was pure FOMO: if you don't have fast 4G, you'll miss the messages, miss the updates, miss the connections that matter. Duracell ran a similar play with their Powermat campaign, showing dead phones and implying their owners were missing out on life itself.

Heineken tried something cleverer with their "Sunrise" campaign, which promoted responsible drinking by reframing excessive drinking as a FOMO trigger—if you're passed out drunk, you'll miss the best parts of the party. Instead of health warnings, they used the fear of missing experiences.

Television broadcasters harness FOMO too. Real-time social media discussions about major events—the Super Bowl, award shows, season finales—create urgency around live viewing. If you watch later, you miss the shared experience, the collective reaction, the feeling of participating in a cultural moment as it happens. Studies suggest this FOMO-driven live viewership actually correlates with higher ratings.

Global Variations on a Universal Theme

While FOMO might be our current linguistic favorite, other cultures identified similar phenomena long ago.

Singaporeans have a word: kiasu. Borrowed from the Hokkien Chinese dialect, kiasu translates roughly to "fear of losing out." But it encompasses more than FOMO does—it includes competitive, stingy, and even selfish behavior driven by the terror of being disadvantaged. Kiasu explains why people might queue for hours for a free sample or hoard more than they need. It's FOMO with sharper elbows.

The term FOMO has spawned its own linguistic children. FOBO—Fear of Better Options—describes the paralysis of having too many choices. Should you commit to this restaurant when a better one might be just around the corner? FOBO keeps you endlessly comparing, never deciding.

JOMO—the Joy of Missing Out—represents the philosophical counter-movement. JOMO is the deliberate satisfaction of staying home, disconnecting, choosing not to participate. It's FOMO's antidote, though achieving genuine JOMO requires confronting the anxiety that makes FOMO so persistent.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a new term emerged: ROMO, the Reality of Missing Out. This wasn't anxiety about potentially missing things; it was the concrete knowledge that you were definitely missing them, because lockdowns and social distancing had removed the choice entirely. Paradoxically, some people found ROMO easier to bear than FOMO—certainty, even unpleasant certainty, can be less stressful than endless uncertainty.

What FOMO Is Not

It's worth distinguishing FOMO from related but different experiences.

FOMO is not simply wanting to do something you can't do. Wanting to attend a concert you can't afford isn't FOMO; it's just disappointment about a specific constraint. FOMO is the ambient anxiety that somewhere, something better is happening that you should be part of—even when you can't identify what that something is.

FOMO is not loneliness, though they often travel together. Loneliness is the pain of disconnection. FOMO is the fear that connection is happening elsewhere, without you. You can be lonely without FOMO, and you can experience FOMO while surrounded by friends.

FOMO is not envy, exactly. Envy targets specific possessions or achievements: you want what someone else has. FOMO is more diffuse—it's not that you want their exact experience, but that you fear any experience you're not having might be the one that matters.

And crucially, FOMO is not rational assessment of opportunity cost. Economists talk about opportunity cost as the value of the next-best alternative you give up when making a choice. That's a useful framework for decision-making. FOMO, by contrast, is an emotional state that often distorts rather than clarifies choices. It makes every unchosen option seem more valuable than it actually is.

The Age and Gender Patterns

FOMO doesn't affect everyone equally. Research reveals some consistent demographic patterns.

Age matters. FOMO correlates negatively with age—the older you get, the less you tend to experience it. This could reflect generational differences in social media use, but it might also reflect something deeper: the gradual acceptance that you can't do everything, and that's okay. Older adults have had more practice making peace with the roads not taken.

Gender plays a role too, though perhaps not in the direction you'd expect. Studies have found that men are more likely than women to report experiencing FOMO. Men also report stronger desires for high social status and more competitive attitudes toward same-gender peers—traits that correlate with FOMO's anxious social comparison.

Interestingly, people with higher FOMO also report more interest in short-term relationships. This makes psychological sense: FOMO is about keeping options open, avoiding commitment to any single path. That orientation might extend to romantic relationships as well, where commitment means closing off alternatives.

Living With FOMO

So what do you do with this knowledge?

First, recognize that FOMO is a symptom, not the disease. When it flares up, it's often signaling unmet needs for connection, competence, or autonomy. Addressing those underlying needs—through meaningful relationships, engaging work, genuine agency over your choices—does more than any number of "digital detox" tips.

Second, understand what social media actually shows you. Those highlight reels are systematically biased toward impressive moments. Nobody's life is as exciting as their Instagram feed suggests. You're not missing as much as your fear insists.

Third, notice when FOMO is driving your behavior in ways that undermine what you actually want. Checking your phone during dinner with friends might seem like it's keeping you connected, but it's degrading the connection you're actually in. The fear of missing out on something elsewhere is causing you to miss out on something here.

Finally, consider that missing out is not just inevitable but sometimes valuable. Every choice is a million unchosen alternatives. Every yes is a thousand implied nos. The person who tries to miss nothing misses the depth that comes from genuine commitment to something—a relationship, a craft, a community, a cause.

FOMO asks: what if there's something better?

Perhaps the better question is: what would be good enough?