FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)

Overthink

Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 31 January 2023

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the next hour, I might miss out on the greatest thing that could happen to me. Or maybe that’s just the FOMO talking. FOMO, the fear of missing out, has infiltrated the zeitgeist in the past decade. What does the obsession with FOMO tell us about our desire to connect with others in an age of consumer capitalism and social media? In episode 70, Ellie and David consider the fear of missing out in light of Nietzsche’s ressentiment, Freud’s psychoanalysis of Little Hans, and how FOMO has changed due to COVID. They consider whether the movement toward JOMO, or the joy of missing out, provides a viable solution to the fear.

Svend Brinkmann, The Joy of Missing Out: The Art of Self-Restraint in an Age of Excess Paperback
Sigmund Freud, Obsessions and Phobias
Sigmund Freud, “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy”
Mayank Gupta and Aditya Sharma, “Fear of missing out: A brief overview of origin, theoretical underpinnings and relationship with mental health”
Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”
Mark Morford, “Oh My God You are So Missing Out”
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing
James A. Roberts and Meredith E. David, “The Social Media Party: Fear of Missing Out (FoMO), Social Media Intensity, Connection, and Well-Being”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone. Welcome to Overthink.
0:15.5	The best of all possible philosophy podcasts, Leibniz would say, I am your co-host, Professor Ellie Anderson.
0:22.1	And I'm your co-host, Dr. David Penya-Gusman.
0:25.4	Dr. David. Do you experience FOMO, otherwise known as fear of missing out?
0:31.3	I honestly don't. I don't experience FOMO in my life. Obviously, I experience regret. You know, sometimes I choose
0:40.1	not to do something and then retroactively, I decide that I should have done that because it's something
0:45.4	that I would have liked to do. Okay. But not really FOMO in the way in which I think people who
0:51.1	succumb to it think about it, which is this constant fear of being
0:56.4	left out of the loop. It's like, leave me out of the loop.
1:00.7	Wow, what an amazing security in your own choices you have, David. Although you did say that
1:06.2	you regret not doing certain things, which I think somebody could say is like a backward
1:10.7	looking fomo. Yes, somebody could say is like a backward-looking
1:11.2	fomo.
1:12.1	Yes, somebody could say that regret is a kind of fomo, maybe like FOMO week or FOMO.
1:18.4	FOMO week?
1:19.9	I think you mean FOMO-Lite, yeah.
1:22.5	FOMO-Lite, yes, FOMO-Lite.
1:24.2	No, but I do think regret is different than FOMO. And the reason is the
1:31.0	temporality. When I regret something, that's a backwards-looking judgment, whereas FOMO is present
1:39.0	and forward-looking. So people who have FOMO are afraid of what they are missing right now in the present or what they are about to miss, often in the near future.
1:50.2	And even beyond the temporality, I think there's also a question of constancy perhaps here.
1:56.4	My regret is not constant.
	...

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