FOMO

FOMO is an acronym of the sentence “Fear Of Missing Out”.

It is the silent noise in your head, when you don’t want to go out, that tells you that if you truly stayed at home, you would miss out on opportunities that will never come again in your life.

What’s worse today, is the fact that if you do decide to skip the opportunity, you are still seeing the favorably distorted projection of your friends’ experience, that is uploaded to social media platforms, often resulting in regret… until you hear the true story of how it went.

While the phrase was claimed by multiple individuals, for example Dan Herman, who states that he identified the phenomenon in the 1990’s, it is still widely accredited to a Harvard student Patrick McGinnis, who popularized the expression through the magazine of Harvard Business School; Harbus in 2004.

McGinnis noticed, how people often felt conflicted about sticking to their plans or just letting them go and going out to have fun, in order to live their lives to the fullest.

The phenomenon of “FOMO” had spread even further, with the growing presence of mass social media sites, like Facebook and Instagram, where people were constantly broadcasting and updating where they were and what they were doing, inciting jealousy and self-blame in everyone who is not living such a full life as them.

The danger doesn’t even lie in sharing everything of what you do; it is the projection of a false, biased image that presents people with a false reality about you, making others get a healthy chunk of “FOMO”.

• Verywellmind – How to Deal With FOMO in Your Life
• Time – This Is The Best Way to Overcome Fear of Missing Out
• Urban Dictionary – Fomo