Among the promotional emails assailing my inbox, there’s a weekly listings roundup clearly aimed at people younger and more pierced than me: recent suggestions include punk karaoke, tarot-themed cabaret and a storytelling night exclusively about tattoos. A few months back, I realised I’d started reading it with pleasure, enjoying the fact that I wouldn’t be attending anything in it. I don’t mean to mock tarot cabaret. Well, maybe a bit. Mainly, though, my pleasure doesn’t arise from smugly believing my leisure activities are objectively better. It’s just that staying aware of what I’m not doing enhances my sense of actively choosing what I am doing. Dinner at home with friends is fun. But it’s more fun when you know you could be schlepping across town to a crowded performance space, or a restaurant that won’t seat you before your whole group’s arrived.
This runs counter to a mindset that dominates our era: Fomo, or the fear of missing out. According to the entrepreneur Caterina Fake, who helped popularise the term, Fomo is “an age-old problem, exacerbated by technology”: we’ve never been so aware of what others are doing, and we aren’t. (Facebook et al cause Fomo, yet profit from it: we check them partly for that feeling of participating at a distance.) It was only a matter of time before someone – in this case Fake’s fellow entrepreneur Anil Dash – came up with a counterpart acronym, which encapsulates my stance towards tarot cabaret: Jomo, the joy of missing out.
“On any given day, in New York City, there’s an event going on that would be the best event of the year back in your hometown,” Dash observes. “Most of the time, you’re not going to be there.” That this might be a source of pleasure first struck him when his son was born. Suddenly, declining something that mattered – a Prince concert, say – was a reaffirmation that fatherhood mattered more. “There can be, and should be, a blissful, serene enjoyment in knowing, and celebrating, that there are folks having the time of their life at something that you might have loved to do, but are simply skipping.” In a similar vein, Liz Danzico, a designer and educator, recently blogged about keeping a list of projects she had to decline: “When I say no… I immediately add my regret to the No List. I’m making lists of cities not seen, airplanes not embarked, and time saved… Several months later, I have a made a substantial something.” If Fomo arises from second-guessing your choices, Jomo means taking ownership of them – whereupon Fomo falls away.
And what if the Fomo era turns out to have been a transitional one, triggered by how new social media still is? Once we’re hyper-connected and used to it, might we finally grasp what’s been true all along: that there’s always a limitless number of cool or meaningful things we’re not doing? Might we then relax? After all, it’s not really “missing out” if everyone’s inevitably doing it; feeling bad about that is like beating yourself up for being unable to count to infinity. Have a good weekend – and enjoy all the ones you’re not having, too.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
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