FOMO is loud.
It shows up as a little spike of anxiety when you see other people out, doing things, posting things, living in a way that looks slightly shinier than your Tuesday night. It’s the uneasy sense that something good is happening elsewhere—and you’re not there. Dictionaries keep it simple: FOMO is “fear of missing out,” that worried feeling you might be missing something exciting, especially because of what you see online.
JOMO is quieter… Is the relief of choosing absence without treating it as loss.
JOMO, the joy of missing out is the pleasure of opting out, logging off, or simply not going, and feeling fine. Better than fine, sometimes. Content. A little smug, even. Dictionary definitions point to exactly that: enjoying personal time and stepping away from social activity (especially the social-media kind).
FOMO: The feeling that life is happening elsewhere
FOMO is older than social media in spirit, but the modern version got its name and acceleration in the early 2000s, when the internet started making other people’s lives more visible and more comparable. The term “FOMO” is widely credited to Patrick J. McGinnis (popularized in a 2004 piece), and it later became a mainstream label for a very recognizable modern itch.
What makes FOMO so sticky is the logic behind it. Modern life doesn’t simply offer options, it broadcasts and turns them into a feed. And feeds have this particular talent for making every moment feel like it’s competing with another moment you’re not having.
A normal evening at home stays perfectly good… right up until it gets measured against someone else’s highlight reel.
A quiet Saturday becomes “wasting the weekend.”
Declining an invitation gets translated into regret before you’ve even felt any.
FOMO frames absence as loss.
So where does JOMO come in?
Usually not as a big decision. More like a slow correction.
At some point, the nervous system gets tired of being recruited. Tired of treating every plan as a test… and then a different preference starts to surface. Not like this heroic “I’m done with everything” moment, more like: you cancel plans, you expect to feel guilty, and then… you don’t. Or you still do, but it’s softer. Manageable. You realize your body is relieved before your brain catches up.
That’s the shift. JOMO is what happens when “missing out” stops feeling like failure and starts feeling like permission. Like, oh—this doesn’t have to be a loss.Sometimes it’s after too many socially good nights in a row. Sometimes it’s age. Sometimes it’s a Canadian winter, where “going out” comes with windburn, boots, and logistics… and suddenly staying in feels like relief. But the common thread is the same: the appetite for quiet gets louder than the appetite for being seen.
And yeah, the term sounds like a trend word. Whatever. The feeling behind it is older than the internet. It’s just finally getting a name.
What JOMO makes room for
This is where a lot of “slow living” content goes wrong, in my opinion. It makes JOMO sound like an aesthetic checklist: candles, tea, linen, silence, long baths, journaling in perfect handwriting.
That’s not what I mean.
JOMO, at its best, is much simpler: the ability to be in one place without mentally negotiating the alternate universe where you’re somewhere else.
So why does JOMO feel so good right now? Modern life is built to keep you slightly activated. Not always in a dramatic way. More like… background agitation. A low-level insistence that you should be reachable, responsive, visible, interesting, updated.
Even leisure gets optimized. Even rest gets narrated. Even fun gets documented.
And it’s not just about social events. JOMO also applies to information:
Not reading every hot take.
Not keeping up with every release.
Not watching the “must-see” show the week it drops.
Not turning every idle moment into content consumption.
There’s a calm that arrives when the mind stops treating everything as urgent.
What if JOMO is just self-knowledge without the “ceremony”?
JOMO is less about fixing yourself and more about learning your own pace again, your real preferences, the ones that exist before the social layer gets involved.
A lot of people don’t know what they actually like anymore without an audience. The “feed” is always there, humming in the background: Should you be doing something else? Should you be making something of this? Should you be somewhere better?
The feed has a sneaky way of turning preferences into performances, you start choosing things that won’t make you look boring, behind, out of touch, cringe—whatever the current word is. And taste stops being this soft, personal thing. It becomes presentable and well curated.
That “Joy of Missing Out” is one of the few modern feelings that doesn’t erase the background chatter so much as it interrupts the habit of listening to it.
Without that constant inner commentary, personal taste comes back in its most unglamorous form: what actually feels good when nobody’s grading it. That’s why comfort shows are such a clean cultural example.
Take Schitt’s Creek… people return to it because it offers a kind of low-threat continuity: warm tone, contained stakes, a world you don’t have to decode, you can enter it without the sense of being late to a conversation.
And that difference matters more than we like to admit. In a loud culture, a “good” choice often means a choice that signals something.
Maybe the deepest relief isn’t staying in or logging off. Maybe it’s the return of continuity—the ability to remain with one feeling long enough to recognize it as yours. Not a performance, but a quieter kind of self-knowledge: learning your pace again, your real yes and no, without the constant pressure to turn preference into proof. And once you’ve tasted that, “missing out” starts to look less like loss and more like a private kind of alignment.
Ane Campos.
I am a lawyer and a Digital Law specialist with over 10 years of experience in social assistance. My professional background allows me to bring a unique perspective that connects personal development, emotional resilience, and the impact of the digital world on self-esteem and clarity of purpose.