Fear of FOMO

In which Jane Austen teaches us how to deal with social anxiety

I have no idea what the lyrics to the Oasis song “Champagne Supernova” mean,¹ except for one single line: “Where were you while we were getting high?” It’s a plaintive refrain heard several times throughout, not part of the chorus itself but a kind of obsessively repeated lead-in. If it’s been a while since you listened to the song, take a second to wallow in the poignancy of that line. I’ve got it all cued up for you. I’ll wait. I promise not to do anything incredibly fun with all our friends while you’re away.

Even though this is my essay, and I am deliberately drawing your attention to this line, and I know it’s coming, and I even have it playing in the background on my computer as I type these words, I still feel like someone is punching me in the gut as I listen. I don’t like to get high any more,² and I didn’t start smoking pot until literally the night before high school graduation so I don’t have a lot of poignant teenage memories associated with it—but it doesn’t matter. The point of the line, the reason it leaves me feeling slightly sick to my stomach with an achingly bittersweet feeling of loss, nostalgia, sadness, grief, and longing, is that it so perfectly imparts the feeling of missing out on something. Something fun, something magical, something intense and transformative and most importantly unrepeatable—that you will simply have to wonder about for the rest of your days on earth. Worse, you will have to listen to your friends talking about it in front of you for the rest of your days on earth: the whole Where were you? cri de coeur implies that you—the listener—are normally part of the gang, should have been there, were sorely missed. If the singer had been lamenting the fact that he himself had missed out on getting high with all his friends, it would not be nearly so affecting. The second-person address puts you in the position of missing out. Oof.

In other words, it perfectly captures the feeling of FOMO. Thank god the roiling centrifugal lunacy of the internet eventually spit out this meme,³ or I would have had to invent it myself. The history of the term FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out, is a contested one (at least according to me). In its fully realized acronymic form, the neologism burst onto the virtual scene in 2004, when a waggish (and judging by his social calendar, perhaps alcoholic) grad student at Harvard Business School published an essay in his student magazine entitled “Social Theory at HBS: McGinnis’ Two FOs.” FO number one, according to McGinnis, is the now-familiar FOMO—which he characterized as a social phenomemon that “weighs heavily on the psyche,” particularly of first-year Harvard business students. FO number two is its shadowy obverse, Fear Of A Better Option. (FOBO failed to take off, which makes perfect sense to me since the author did not make it entirely clear what the difference is between the two FOs. He claimed that they are opposite principles that work in synergy to eventually create social paralysis, but to my mind FOBO is just a sub-species of FOMO—and apparently the rest of the 2004 internet felt the same.⁴)

Controversy soon struck,⁵ however, when a marketing dude named Dan Herman claimed that he had actually coined the term four years earlier, in an academic⁶ article entitled “Introducing Short-Term Brands: A New Branding Tool for a New Consumer Reality.” (Note to all other publishing academics, both marketing and non-: if your subtitle repeats a word from your title, you are doing something wrong.) The thesis of this work is that there has been a crisis in “branding”—a high failure rate of new brands and a marked erosion of brand loyalty⁷—due to a “deep change that has taken place in consumer be­haviour.” Even though I am entirely skeptical of the raison d’etre of this article, I have to say that about halfway through things take a turn for the delightfully weird. Herman’s suite of explanations for the “brand crisis” includes: a wide variety of “choice options” that ultimately leaves us with the responsibility of crafting our own identities; increased class mobility; weakened familial and social structures; lack of community; the erosion of tradition and “eldery wisdom” in favor of “worshipping youth”; an undermining in our “belief in ‘one absolute truth’”; a general condition in which we “live in a perpetual ‘now’”; and destabilization of the idea of a core self. Together, these multifarious phenomena “at the basis of post­-modernity” have scrambled consumer behavior and thrown all of conventional marketing wisdom to the winds. To hear Dan Herman tell it, the very heart and soul of our economy—nay, democracy itself—is at stake. That’s a lot of Portentous Meaning to load onto the fragile shoulders of the housewife hesitating between Cheerios and the half-price Kroger knock-off on the next shelf.⁸

Here is where the claim that Herman invented “FOMO” comes in. He sums up the root cause of the burgeoning “brand crisis” thus: “The emerging portrait is of a person and consumer who is led by a new basic motivation: ambition to exhaust all possibilities and the fear of missing out on something” [emphasis added]. So as far as I can tell, the issue with the young Harvard toper McGinnis getting credit for “FOMO” (and all the rights, privileges, and emoluments accruing thereto) is that Dan Herman had written the commonplace phrase “fear of missing out” in an article four years earlier. This would be like me claiming that I had thought up toothpaste because I’ve noticed that my mouth feels fresher after I brush my teeth. But the real problem with this claim is that one can find gabillions of instances of the phrase “fear of missing out” on the internet before 2004, including in published academic articles.⁹ Obviously the credit for FOMO—as any marketing expert would agree—should go to the person who packaged the phrase into a neat little bundle, defined it succinctly in a clickbait article, provided some pithy examples, gave it its own punchy acronym, and thus essentially (dare we say?) turned it into a brand.¹⁰

Thenceforth the history of FOMO is pretty straightforward. After McGinnis’s article, the concept got picked up here and there on the internet, made its way into some online slang lexicons, and eventually came to the attention of psychology researchers looking to understand all the ways in which the internet was ruining our lives. Thus memed, opinion-pieced, and researched to death, the term ultimately ended up in the Oxford English Dictionary, that stately and venerable graveyard of neologisms. We all know what FOMO means by now, even your grandma whose right earlobe features so prominently onscreen in family FaceTime calls. So why am I revisiting the concept at this late date? Because, Dear Reader, I believe I have stumbled across a kind of ... not cure, exactly, and not quite an antidote ... but perhaps a palliative for the feeling of FOMO. And believe me, if your humble author—who at the age of 10 sat on the edge of her bed with her 6^th-grade class photo in her hands, sobbing Where did it all go?—can find relief from FOMO, then anyone can.

Before we go any further, let me hasten to assure you that my cure is not that trumpery acronym-come-lately JOMO, or “Joy Of Missing Out.” This cynical concept was dreamt up by a band of hardened misanthropes who claim that it is generally more pleasant to refuse a social invitation (or *shudder* cancel one you have already made) in favor of moping at home in your pajamas and “enjoying” contemplating not doing the fun thing all your friends are doing. That is, if you still have any friends left after a few sessions of bailing on the thoughtful plans they’ve made for you. As an inveterate extrovert I quail in horror at the thought that JOMO might take stronger hold in our society. (It’s already taken far too strong a hold as far as I am concerned. I am ruddy sick and tired of the now socially acceptable practice of canceling at the last minute because you’re “not up for socializing” or “need some Me Time.” Enough honesty! At least have the decency to make up a fake emergency for crying out loud.¹¹) My therapy for FOMO is, I think, far more subtle than JOMO—more like an isometric exercise than flinging a medicine ball against the wall. It requires a slight adjustment in attitude, a kind of elegant acquiescence to the fates, a gentle leaning in to a situation one cannot control—basically, a letting go.

The truth is, I cannot take credit for this discovery—many a nineteenth-century novelist has gone before us and shown the way. Reader, it is from the pages of Persuasion, Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, and Villette that I gleaned the advice I am about to pass on to you. Granted, you are free to read (or re-read) these novels themselves with an eye toward unearthing their coded advice for overcoming social discomfort, but life is short and you are in the hands of a professional. Sit back and relax; I’ve been doing this since I was eight years old.

Let us begin with Jane Austen. Mr. Waffle and I have a longstanding, ongoing, and frankly irritating debate over whether Persuasion or Mansfield Park is the better novel. (He is clearly insane, because it’s Mansfield Park.) But the salient point for our purposes is that the heroines of these novels, Anne Elliott and Fanny Price respectively, are two of the saddest sacks ever to appear in the pages of classic literature.¹² At the opening of Persuasion, Anne is a 27-year-old decrepit old maid who years earlier had rejected a marriage proposal from a young, dashing, but poor aspiring naval officer. In making this fateful decision, she had foolishly heeded the advice of her snobby mentor (hence the title), who assumed that Captain Wentworth would never amount to anything. But—dunh dunh DUNH—he has amounted to something! The action of the novel commences when Wentworth pops back into Anne’s life, a rich,¹³ successful, and respected officer who is now on the hunt for a wife. (I guess he was on the hunt for a wife before, too, since he proposed to Anne and all. But now he means it.) The vast majority of the plot consists of Anne, a pale imitation of her former self, hanging back in the shadows and watching Wentworth court the bougie upstart Louisa Musgrove right under her nose. About 0.0000087% of the way from the end of the novel, he does an abrupt about-face and decides he wants to marry Anne after all. The end.

But Persuasion—even though it was written later, published posthumously, and widely considered the culmination of Austen’s genius (why?)—is but a warm-up for the veritable Festival of FOMO that awaits the reader in Mansfield Park. At least Persuasion’s Anne is from an aristocratic family, can take her place in the highest social circles, and receives a certain amount of respect from those around her (when they remember she’s there, that is). When you identify as a reader with Anne, you get to be right there in the parlor and the ballroom where all the action unfolds, even if that action does cause you pain. Fanny Price, on the other hand, is utterly abject, a wan dormouse of a girl who has been quasi-adopted by rich relatives because her own parents can’t seem to stop procreating.¹⁴ While she’s not quite as bad off as the literal orphan Jane Eyre with her monstrous relatives the Reeds, Fanny is consistently treated by her aunt, uncle, and cousins with benign neglect and a marked “difference” meant to remind her of her inferior social station. (As if she could forget!) When you identify as a reader with Fanny Price, you get to spend vast amounts of time in the garrett wondering what everyone else is up to downstairs.

And what they are up to is very naughty—and therefore very interesting—indeed. When patriarch Sir Thomas goes off to Antigua to oversee his “estates,”¹⁵ the adult children left behind—along with sexycool new neighbors (and potential love interests) Mary and Henry Crawford—indulge in all kinds of patriarch-free hijinx. They mount an amateur theatrical production of the naughty-sexy play Lover’s Vows, using Sir Thomas’s private study! They gatecrash a beautiful nearby estate and leave Fanny to sit alone on a bench while they explore! They go horseback riding without Fanny—using her horse! The only one of the gang who ever notices she’s around is her cousin Edmund, who throws her a few scraps of attention now and then and with whom she is thereby contractually obligated to fall in love.

Furthermore, while Anne Elliott has only one painful spectacle to observe—Wentworth’s horndogging on Louisa Musgrove—Fanny has to sit through multiple riotous plots featuring her being left out before she gets her calm, decorous reward at the end (a calm, decorous marriage with calm, decorous Edmund). But it’s all okay, because our heroine has been well trained not to care. Poor Fanny “had no share in the festivities of the season.... As to her cousins’ gaieties, she loved to hear an account of them, especially of the balls, and whom Edmund had danced with; but thought too lowly of her own situation to imagine she should ever be admitted to the same, and listened, therefore, without an idea of any nearer concern in them.” Not only is she missing out, realizes she’s missing out, and has trained herself not to care about missing out, but in her breast resides not even a whisper of hubris that she has any claim to a life other than one spent missing out. (In a garrett. Without a fire.) Ouch.

The novel makes it abundantly clear that Fanny’s attitude toward her situation is inextricably connected to her ultimate reward. It is because she resists the pangs of FOMO that she gains the approval of the returned patriarch and the approbation and calm affection of her (eventual) cousin-husband. But there is a more subtle point to be made here, I think. Austen is by no means instructing her readers that meek acquiescence is always the best course of action for a marriageable heroine: witness Emma, that saucy minx, or Elizabeth Bennet, who snaps right back at Darcy when he is proud and inflexible. Fanny’s passivity is the best course of action given her particular circumstances. Because she has no other real option, because she is friendless and poor, she leans into the delicious masochism of FOMO and trusts to something (Providence? patriarchy? time? the novel?) to reward her—and it does.

I am not suggesting that we all start acting like Snow White waiting patiently for her prince to come. Obviously Fanny, along with her author, is the product of a viciously repressive patriarchal regime that celebrates passivity as the sine qua non of feminine virtue. (Although again, Austen is smarter and wilier than the patriarchy that produced her.) But in recent years I have come to admire Fanny Price a wee bit. I have begun to appreciate the benefits of loosening my grip, just a little, on my perpetual anxiety that I am being abandoned by all my friends. The anxiety has always been there, since my earliest memories, no matter what my life circumstances—single, coupled, living alone, living with people, new job, old job, cats, no cats,¹⁶ etc. So if it’s always there, no matter what, then it must be me, right? The call is coming from inside the house. And if it’s just ... me, then there is something to be said for sitting with the discomfort, quietly, patiently, waiting for it to pass.

As it always does. The friends come back. They were just out back of the middle school getting high without you, but they’ll tell you all about it later. They really wish you had been there. They have stories. They are bringing firewood to your garrett. The novel provides.

1. Apparently neither does its author, Noel Gallagher.

2. Like a lot of Gen Xers, I find the pot that These Kids Today are smoking—or vaping or swallowing—way too strong. I don’t want to fucking hallucinate; I just want to feel a little silly and chatty and then sleepy.

3. Also, thank god for the Know Your Meme database, the OED of the internet.

4. It doesn’t help that the “F”s in his two acronyms are not grammatically or conceptually parallel: in the case of FOMO, the “F” is a genuine fear of something; in the case of FOBO the “F” represents a fear that something desirable might take place.

5. Again, this is a completely made-up controversy that I have invented for dramatic effect. My determination after minutes of internet research is that the credit for inventing FOMO should go to McGinnis; I have no idea if Dan Herman actually takes credit himself or not—the website Know Your Meme has made the claim on his behalf, which I think is wrong.

6. I now know there is such a thing as “academic” marketing theory.

7. I am not a marketing expert, but to my untrained eye these two critera for “brand success” seem contradictory: surely a market in which new brands are failing to take hold might in fact be one in which there is a high degree of brand loyalty?

8. Or as my friend Rusty refers to off-brand oaten cereal hoops: “Melancholios.”

9. As long ago as 1987 Bruce Weber was already using the phrase, in its contemporary usage, in The New York Times: “Acquire, acquire. Career, career. We’re all afraid to slow down for fear of missing out on something. That extends to your social life as well.”

10. I guess it’s not surprising that a business grad student and a marketing dude would be the first to codify the idea of FOMO—it’s basically just another way of describing the concept of opportunity cost.

11. This social mortal sin is second only to the latest horrifying development amongst people I know: the practice of refusing to outright accept or decline an invitation by saying “Maybe! Let me wait and see if anything else comes up. Can I let you know?” Nope. Nopenopenopenopenope.

12. I will avoid major spoilers here insofar as it’s possible—but c’mon: you’ve had over two hundred years to read these books. (Also, is it really possible to spoil a Jane Austen novel? In the end, they get married.)

13. One of the strangest things about this novel to a modern sensibility is the way in which Wentworth has made his fortune: by capturing enemy ships, seizing the goods they were carrying, and keeping the lion’s share of the spoils (the rest of the booty would have been shared among his ship’s crew members, mercenaries who made their living this way). As the narrator tells us in Chapter Four, in the intervening years Wentworth “had distinguished himself, and early gained the other step in rank—and must now, by successive captures, have made a handsome fortune.” As always in an Austen novel, it’s the fortune that has made him suddenly marriageable.

14. Another Austenian mystery: no one had access to reliable birth control in the 18^th century, so why do poor people in Austen’s novels breed like rabbits while aristocratic families always seem to have a decorous 3-4 children? (The fact that the Bennets in Pride and Prejudice have five daughters is simply further proof that they are Not Quite Our Kind.)

15. *cough*slavery*cough*

16. It goes without saying that a life without cats is barely a life at all.