FOMO is fake gravity, don't let it pull you down.

Every screen is inviting you into a hole in the ground.

I’ve been trying to burrow to the center of my FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) lately. I want to peel back each layer until I’m inside the core and can understand it, like an archeologist inspecting a cave for historical sediment. Then, once I’ve traced the history of the rock layers, I can lecture people and watch their eyes glaze over in boredom.

Sadly, digging for this core makes me feel more like the crazed Tootsie Pop Owl licking toward oblivion (insert sexually charged jokes here) than a poised archeologist. I’m mostly pantsless wearing a graduate cap while precariously balancing myself on a tree branch. For some reason, there’s also a little boy there whose clearly a latchkey kid because his parents let him hang out with this slutty owl all the time.

All this is to say, I’ve been fixating a lot on FOMO lately. This fixation has tossed me down rabbitholes FULL of rabbits eating more expensive kibble and having more sex than the rest of us (they just go at it in public parks).

Fun fact: unhealthy fixation is one of the mental health symptoms caused by FOMO. What a gorgeous self-sustaining ecosystem, it’s like a beautiful waterfall that God herself is pissing in.

I don’t have to go to archeology school to say, that as a human feeling, FOMO isn’t new. The sensation of looking through the glass into other people’s has lived under many names throughout history. The most obvious predecessor, “Keeping Up With The Joneses,” was the name of a comic strip by Pop Momand that ran from 1913 to 1938.

The comic strip followed the McGinis Family — married social climbers, their daughter Julie, and their housekeeper Bella. In keeping with the theme, the McGinis family lived in a constant spiral of analog compare-and-despair. They didn’t make enough money, they weren’t invited to the right parties, they couldn’t swing the top-of-the-line horse and carriage everyone was raving about! You know the score, we’ve all been there, especially with the horses.

The plot of the strip was loosely inspired by Momand’s experiences with his (ex)-wife in Nassau County, where high housing costs and lifestyle creep drove them away from each other. And eventually, they were driven from the neighborhood itself. The process of being priced out, both literally and emotionally, was enough to fuel years worth of roast jokes about the void of cultural peacocking.

When I realized the phrase came from Momand and his personal experiences, I wanted to learn how this idiom catapulted him to fame. Did he live out the ultimate meta-joke by swimming in larger pools than the Joneses after successfully roasting the empty treadmill of materialism? Well, not exactly. In keeping with the tradition of capitalism wringing out artists for gems without paying up, the phrase “Keeping Up With The Joneses” spread like wildfire. But the strip itself wasn’t widely merchandised like many of its contemporaries.

Don’t get me wrong, Pop Momand didn’t face the tragic kismet of many artists unable to survive at all. He worked on the strip for 25 years! He was published and credited. Also, the strip was adapted into a series of silent shorts by the French film studio Gaumont Film Company in 1915 and 1916. But he wasn’t a household name in the way his phrase was, and he ultimately transitioned to working as a portrait painter after his farewell strip in 1938.

My fascination with Momand’s contribution to the language of compare-and-despair is twofold. One: I’m obsessed with tracing the evolution of hyper-specific human feelings, and how they’ve been named and explored in the past. Two: I’m a glutton for any history related to visual art.

All of this brings me to the present issue at hand: the mass contagion of FOMO online. In the arc of history, I’d argue that FOMO has the family DNA of “Keeping Up with the Joneses.” But like many children, FOMO wakes up and faces uniquely modern issues that set apart her identity (I decided she’s a girl).

The specifically modern phenomenon of FOMO was first written about by marketing strategist Dan Herman, who believed the proliferation of phones and internet usage was ushering in a new era of comparison and exclusion. Building on this idea, the author Patrick J. McGinnis coined the term FOMO in a 2004 article in The Harbus, where he compared FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and FOBO (Fear of a Better Option) in order to paint a humorously bleak portrait of campus life.

If we’re anthropomorphizing FOMO as a person (let’s do it — simply because I want to), she’s now 20-years-old, just old enough to induce a morbid spiral in those of us who remember her birth into the lexicon. But also young enough to remind us how brand new this upgrade in existential angst is.

When brought up in conversation, FOMO is often relegated to the surface. She’s a mere fleeting moment of jealousy, a flash of inverted dopamine on your phone when you see friends are out for Happy Hour, or you missed the live finale of your favorite show.

But in my experience, her sensation is much deeper than that. There’s a dislocation in FOMO that feels extra-modern. In an age with more accessible plane travel (at least, compared to 1913), and 24/7 internet access, people are both easier and harder to reach at all times. Regardless of individual class or privilege, there’s a sense that you could be anywhere at anytime, shooting the shit with anyone, even creating something that goes viral and CHANGES YOUR LIFE! This sense presents a double-bind: social media’s non-stop onslaught IS a magic portal of possibility, and it’s ALSO a giant cudgel beating our attention spans away from the ground beneath our feet.

When I experience FOMO while scrolling: it’s not simply about jealousy, or materialistic comparisons, or even the need to ALWAYS BE INVITED. It’s more complex than that. It’s a gnawing feeling of being far away from Real Life. It feels like gravity has escaped me, except instead of floating around in the Milky Way gazing at the stars, I’m whizzing through storm clouds like a helium balloon that escaped a birthday party. The center of gravity has escaped me, and real life is happening at the birthday party, but I can’t get there! And maybe now I’ll never be invited to another birthday party again? And then I’ll die up here in this depressing ass cloud! Also, why the fuck am I a balloon?

In a mental health study carried out by the National Library of Medicine, high levels of FOMO were linked with insomnia, “distorted perceptions of the edited lives of others,” a lack of emotional control, and a compulsive need to “maintain social connections.” Okay feeling targeted, drag me behind the shed and shoot me, already!

Perhaps one of the most fascinating (and unsurprising) findings, was that patients suffering high levels FOMO end up functionally abandoning their IRL friendships in order to “compulsively” maintain an online image and online relationships. The work of in-person relationships is swapped out for the hope of the online theater, there’s a sense that if you compulsively stay online you won’t be left behind during the cultural rapture. This all tracks, both anecdotally and from a peer-reviewed data level. We’re in an age of non-stop taping — not only by Google’s surveillance capitalism infrastructure, but by neighbors and friends hoping to hit the algorithmic jackpot with a hot clip. The fact that people neglect and abandon in-person relationships for the digital casino isn’t surprising. A conversation in-person is scary, it requires vulnerability and an awareness of your physical body that can frankly suck, at times. It’s a lot of work to exist in physical space!

On top of that, the economic demands of 2024, COVID, and mass political unrest make IRL friendship time much harder to carve out, if not impossible. So, in moments of boredom, burnout, and isolation, the phone lures us into world full of glimmering mansions and impossibly prolific artists and offensively hot people.

Naturally, the sickos who socially engineered these apps rigged it to serve up ultra-personalized malaise. The “Keeping Up With The Joneses” phenomenon was merely transported through newspapers, books, gossip and social events. Meanwhile, FOMO reads your intrusive thoughts, builds a map around your internet searches, and serves you up the most melancholy playlist of people you miss and places you’ve not yet reached (physically or metaphorically).

No matter how much you know its curation, an illusion, and a heightening of pre-existing disparities, the online rhythms are built to make you feel like you’re locked in a room off-campus while the rest of the school is at the party. FOMO is a far more complex feeling than missing someone, or feeling inadequate, jealous, or left out, she’s “Keeping Up With The Joneses” on designer drugs. She combines the uniquely new experience of online public life with the very dislocation it causes.

It highlights the ways we’re all staring into the glass as if it’s a physical location, one that’s whirling away from us, when in fact: we’re all staring at a cell tower together.

PS: I have a lot more to say about this!. Especially, my personal cocktail of homesickness and FOMO, which pair together like wine and cheese you keep gorging on. But this post has almost exceeded emailed limits, so that’s for another post.