On Friday, April 10, I wrote a column in The Business Press about FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) vs. JOMO (Joy of Missing Out). After composing my own version, I queried two Artificial Intelligence (AI) resources (ChatGPT and Claude) so I might compare their creativity and grasp of the subject. My conclusion: AI writing is improving. We’re better served to compose our own content and use AI to augment, rather than replace, our personal touch. Please find below the Claude version. My previous column will featured the ChatGPT version. I’m just helping you make sure that you are not… missing out!
The Fear of Missing Out vs. The Joy of Missing Out: A Peace Treaty For most of human history, missing something was simple. You didn’t go to the village feast, you didn’t go. No one sent you seventeen photos of the roasted pig. No one posted a story about how *insane* the lute player was. You just lived your quiet, uninformed life, blissfully unaware of what you’d skipped. It was, by all accounts, fine.
Then came the internet, and with it, FOMO — the Fear of Missing Out — a psychological affliction so perfectly calibrated to modern life that it could only have been designed by someone who really, really hated us. FOMO is the nagging conviction that somewhere, right now, something better is happening without you. A rooftop party. A pop-up restaurant that only exists for one night. A conversation at a dinner table where someone finally explains what’s actually going on with the economy. You are not there. You are on your couch in socks, and this is a personal failure.
The symptoms are well-documented. You agree to four things on Saturday because you can’t bear to commit to just one and risk picking wrong. You check Instagram mid-conversation to confirm that the people you’re already with aren’t, somehow, also somewhere more interesting. You RSVP yes to a friend’s improv show, spend two weeks dreading it, attend anyway, and spend the whole time wishing you were home — which is the most FOMO move of all, because now you’re missing *that* too.
FOMO is expensive. It costs you money (festival tickets, last-minute flights, the inexplicable $200 dinner you said yes to because everyone else was going). It costs you sleep. It costs you the ability to enjoy wherever you actually are, because your brain is too busy calculating where else you could theoretically be.
Enter JOMO — the Joy of Missing Out — which is less a philosophy and more a permission slip you write yourself, usually around age 32. JOMO is the warm, slightly smug satisfaction of declining. It is the cancelled plan that, when the day arrives, feels like receiving a small inheritance. It is texting “so sorry, can’t make it!” and then immediately making tea and getting into bed with a book at 8:47 p.m. on a Friday, and thinking: *this is the life.*
JOMO practitioners have discovered a radical truth: most things you miss, you don’t actually miss. The concert was fine. The networking event was a room full of people pretending to be more interested in each other than they were. The “unmissable” brunch ended, people went home, and the world continued rotating on its axis without your presence at the eggs Benedict table. There is a class of person who has achieved full JOMO enlightenment. They leave parties early — not because anything is wrong, but because they’ve done the math and determined that the last hour is never worth it. They don’t check their phones during movies. They have, at some point, simply not gone to something and told no one and felt nothing about it. These people are either very healthy or very boring, and the line between the two is thinner than anyone wants to admit.
Of course, JOMO has its own trap. Taken too far, it becomes hermitage with good branding. If you’re saying no to everything — the dinner, the walk, the friend who just needs forty-five minutes — you’re not cultivating inner peace. You’re just becoming the person no one invites anymore, which is a different kind of missing out, and considerably sadder.
The honest answer is that neither extreme serves you. FOMO turns your life into a highlight reel you’re not even in. Pure JOMO turns it into a stillness that starts to resemble a waiting room.
What most people eventually land on is something quieter: a loose ability to distinguish between the things worth showing up for and the things that just look that way from a distance. To go to the party you actually want to attend. To skip the one you don’t. And to resist, with whatever strength you have left, checking your phone to see how the other one turned out.
The village feast will happen again. And sometimes the lute player really isn’t that good. My take: With AI, the paragraphs are too long, and there is no personal context to share any examples beyond the generic. On the positive side, AI is becoming cleverer and wittier when prompted.
John Fletcher is CEO/Founder of Fletcher Consulting Public Relations in Arlington, where he is a master at connecting friends and clients with important resources and composing award-winning nominations. Contact him at john@thefletch.org
