On the Other Hand - JOMO Reconsidered

Photo by Nijwam Swargiary on Unsplash

Well that didn’t last long. I endured my separation from social media maybe ten days. OK. Maybe a week.

It came right after the holidays and my daughter’s birthday, and people were posting pictures I’d have no other way to see. Then vanity struck. I couldn’t share a couple of newsletter posts. Couldn’t get any new subscribers. Missed the feedback. Yes I was free of constantly checking to see if anyone commented on Facebook on what I’d written, or even liked a piece, but I thought of constantly checking anyway. All the time.

I even missed the ads that chase you around and creep into your feed when you scroll. Ads eerily prescient, as if your phone was listening to your conversation with your wife the night before and embedding brand names into some algorithm that kicks in pleasurable waves of dopamine just as it shocks you. Which it was.

This seductive tap on the shoulder that is social media overwhelmed my foray into JOMO – the joy of missing out. I rationalized all this by finding a study that says maybe JOMO isn’t such a good thing after all.

The researchers wrote, “When trying to assess JOMO, we found that some people were enjoying missing out, not for the solitude or a Zen-like, calming experience of being able to regroup, but more to avoid social interaction.”

Only 10% of the survey subjects truly benefited from, in some monastic sense, JOMO. Everybody else was dealing with some level of social anxiety. Forays into JOMO may be healthy, but a life of JOMO probably means the person is avoiding something they’re afraid of. Like social interaction. “If it’s because they need to recharge, that’s maybe a good thing. If they’re trying to avoid something, that is probably not healthy in the long run.”

So are we trapped in a world of ever-connected, always on media that both Mark Zuckerberg and these researchers say is good for us? No. Practices like meditation, movement and meaningful work can give us an introspective, life-affirming reset, a deep personal knowledge, that social media cannot. But people need to connect, and social media is how we connect these days.

Here's one for the kids. I remember decades ago reading the back page of the Village Voice, on which countless, anonymous people bought one or two sentence ads looking for people they met in a bar, but didn’t get a number, others reaching out into the void with a message for a long-lost loved one, some giving away puppies, and others hoping to hook-up for some sexual kink. What these people wouldn’t have given for Tik Tok.

Or maybe not. Maybe it was the anonymity of that page that brought out these declarations. Maybe much of it wasn’t real at all. It was easier to create a persona, live it for a while, and then change into something else in the 20^th century. The media, so small by today’s standards, seemed to have no memory. Now media, and the advertisers and that data that fuel connection, lasts forever. You can’t get away from what you’ve posted. Ever. But oh, the reach. How few people read that Village Voice ad? But how many could read you, if you could only go viral? And in some dark but optimistic way, every one of us who posts something on social media wants to go viral.

How’s that for JOMO?

So I’m back online looking up from the screen shocked by how much time has passed. In some sad sense all this connection does is re-emphasize that while I’m sitting here wired-in to everybody I’ve ever known and every idea people have ever had, dopamine dancing in my head approximating the rush I got in my early twenties from methamphetamine, I am missing out on so many things I’ll never find online.

The hard truth of life is that one way or another we’re always missing out. Always have been. As we do anything, we lose time to do something else. We sacrifice, sometimes great sacrifice, to get what we want. That’s the engine of progress, the engine of discovery and creativity, and yes, the engine of happiness. FOMO and JOMO are just new names for what has always moved us. Those of us who have been positively moved have just focused on what we have, and what we are working toward, instead of what we’re missing out on. The bird in the hand vs the two in the bush. The idea that we’re OK, just as we are, and we can even get better if we keep it healthy and keep at it.

To end this, just like any groveling influencer, I’ll urge you to smash subscribe below and hammer away at that like button. And share this; yes, share please. Someone may be missing out.