FOMO vs. JOMO: The Anxiety Engine You Shipped

You ship a feature. Engagement rises. People open the app more often. In more places. With less intention.

On paper, the line goes up.

Off paper, something else is happening. A low-grade anxiety that follows users like background noise. They are “connected” in the technical sense. Strangely less connected in the human sense.

This is the territory where FOMO lives. Not the meme version. Not the brunch version. The real version: a persistent sense that something important is happening elsewhere, and you should be monitoring it.

Psychologists define it precisely: apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences without you, coupled with a desire to stay continually connected.

That word matters. Continually. Not often. Not when needed.

If you build products, that word should make you sit up. Because “continually connected” is not a personal quirk. It is a system outcome.

The uncertainty engine Link to heading

Most people talk about FOMO as if it is about events. It usually is not. It is about uncertainty in a social world where belonging still carries weight.

When belonging feels stable, you can miss updates and keep walking. When it feels unstable, you start scanning. You check. You check again. You check without deciding to check.

Self-determination theory offers a frame: humans do better when autonomy, competence, and relatedness are intact. Remove one, and reaching starts. FOMO shows up when relatedness feels ambiguous and autonomy gets outsourced to the feed.

Here is the first design-relevant point. You can build a product that makes people feel informed without making them feel secure. You can increase information while increasing uncertainty, because the user’s map keeps changing as they look at it.

A social feed is not content delivery. It is an environment for constant social inference. Who is with whom. Who got invited. Who got promoted. Who is thriving. Who is being seen.

The more you refresh, the more you learn. The more you learn, the more you realize what you do not know.

If you wanted a recipe for compulsive checking, that would do.

The ranking machine Link to heading

Social comparison is not a modern pathology. It is one of the brain’s oldest orientation tools. In a village, it helped you calibrate status and risk. In a city, it helps you decide what is normal.

In a global feed, it becomes an always-on measurement instrument pointed at your self-concept.

The mechanism is not mysterious. Passive consumption of social content predicts more comparison and less connection. Verduyn’s work found that passive scrolling predicts declines in well-being, with envy as the key pathway. Translation: staring at curated outcomes makes you feel worse, especially when you are not actually interacting with anyone.

This is why “screen time” is a blunt metric. Time is not the only variable. Mode matters. The feed can function as a window, a mirror, or a scale. Most of the time it is all three. The scale is loudest.

Meta-analyses confirm it: exposure to upward comparison cues produces “contrast” as the dominant response. The brain translates what it sees into a verdict. They are up there. I am down here.

FOMO is not fear of missing events. It is fear of missing status. Belonging. Relevance. The feed makes these feel measurable, and therefore chaseable.

What is chaseable becomes a job.

The residue tax Link to heading

Even if you removed envy, you would still have a problem. Always-online life is not just social. It is attentional.

You are reading a spec. A notification arrives. You flick over. You return. You try to regain the thread. It takes longer than you admit.

Sophie Leroy’s work on attention residue is clear: when you switch tasks, part of your mind remains stuck on the previous one. Performance suffers on the next. The residue is not a metaphor. It is the hangover of unfinished cognitive work.

Scale that across a day. Email, Slack, feed, group chats, analytics, calendar pings, news alerts that sound like a fire alarm. You do not just lose focus. You lose the felt sense of completion. You finish fewer things deeply. Your nervous system notices.

This is where FOMO grows teeth. A fragmented mind is easier to nudge. A mind with residue is easier to hook, because it already feels behind. “Just check” becomes a micro-escape from the discomfort of unfinished work, even though it adds more unfinished work.

The anxiety of being online looks like an individual problem. It behaves like a systems problem. The user feels weak. The environment is simply expensive.

The control panel you built Link to heading

If you work in product, you have heard the line: “We’re increasing connection.”

Often what we are increasing is not connection. It is monitoring.

We converted social life into a control panel. The user is expected to keep an eye on it, because the system keeps emitting signals that important things are happening just out of frame.

Common accelerants:

• Ranked feeds that make social reality feel like a contest.
• Endless scroll that removes natural stopping points.
• Read receipts that turn response latency into a social hazard.
• Streaks that convert time away into a loss.

None of these are inherently evil. They are choices. They are incentives. They are decisions that make certain feelings more likely.

The feelings are not subtle. They are the daily texture of the user’s attention. The interface does not need to say “urgent.” The user’s body already learned the lesson.

Here is the uncomfortable question: when a user opens your product ten times a day, do they feel more like a citizen or more like a watchman?

What JOMO actually is Link to heading

The joy of missing out has been framed as a cultural reply to FOMO. Anil Dash named it years ago: relief from the constant psychic bookkeeping of being plugged in.

But JOMO gets misunderstood in two directions. One group turns it into bragging. Look how offline I am. The other treats it as self-help. Just choose joy, like a responsible adult.

Both miss the point.

JOMO is often what happens when a system has been running too hot for too long. Not a moral achievement. A pressure release.

It starts as annoyance. Then fatigue. Then the quiet recognition that the feed is not adding information you can use; it is adding agitation. Disengagement stops feeling like deprivation and starts feeling like regaining traction.

The surprising part, if you have lived in FOMO for a while, is what shows up in the space you created.

Not serenity. Not at first. More like awkwardness. A small social silence. A gap where identity performance used to live.

That gap can feel like walking into a forest after being in traffic all day. The first thing you notice is the ringing in your ears. The second thing you notice is that the ringing was always there. You just kept it covered with noise.

This is where JOMO can become self-discovery. Not because it is noble, but because it removes a constant source of distortion.

When you are not constantly reacting to other people’s signals, you can ask a simpler question: what do I actually want?

That is not a lifestyle brand. That is autonomy.

What builders might do instead Link to heading

If FOMO is the anxiety of always being online, the design question is not “How do we make users check less?” That is scolding disguised as a feature.

A better question: what would it mean to build products that do not require vigilance?

Three directions.

First, make absence legible. Not punished. Not morally framed. Just supported. If the user is away, the system should not behave like they are falling behind.

Second, restore natural stopping points. Humans do not need infinite. They need enough. Endings are not failures. They are orientation.

Third, distinguish connection from consumption. If your interface rewards passive monitoring, you are turning social life into surveillance. If it rewards deliberate interaction, you are at least aiming at something recognizably human.

One sharp metric change: if “engagement” is your proxy for value, try adding “regret.” Ask users whether they feel good about time spent after the session. People are often honest when you give them language.

You probably will not do most of this. The incentives point elsewhere. But you should at least know what you are choosing.

The training question Link to heading

FOMO is a signal that the environment is demanding constant orientation. JOMO is often the moment someone decides they do not want to live like a watchman.

If you build digital environments, you are not just shipping features. You are shaping training loops.

You are teaching people what matters. What to monitor. Whether silence is safe.

The most cynical version of product: keep the user slightly uneasy, then sell them relief in small doses of updates.

It works. It also shrinks the mind.

A more humane version is harder because it asks for restraint. Designs that can tolerate the user’s absence. That can quietly respect it.

If you want one question to carry out of this essay, make it this:

When your product wins, what kind of attention does it create?

Attention is not just a resource. It is a direction of travel.

And people, unlike dashboards, remember where they have been steered.