She turned off notifications on a Tuesday and did not miss anything.
Literal meaning: JOMO — Joy of Missing Out — describes a deliberate embrace of absence: choosing not to attend, not to follow, not to participate, and finding satisfaction in that choice rather than anxiety. It positions itself as the conscious counter to FOMO (Fear of Missing Out).
Origin: The term was coined by Anil Dash in a 2012 blog post as a personal response to digital overload. It circulated in tech and media culture before entering broader lifestyle discourse. By the mid-2010s, JOMO had become a wellness concept, appearing in books, articles, and retreats alongside Digital Detox and slow living movements.
The Joy of Missing Out — the reframing of disconnection as a positive choice, marketed via the platforms it claims to resist.
The Appeal: JOMO addresses something real. The anxiety of constant connection is genuine. The permission to miss things, to not respond immediately, to choose quiet over stimulation, is valuable — and for many people, practising JOMO produces measurable improvements in wellbeing. The concept has genuine therapeutic utility.
The Friction: JOMO shares the structural paradox of all counter-movements — resistance that reproduces what it resists. JOMO content is produced for and distributed on the platforms it claims to escape. The lifestyle brand of deliberate disconnection generates engagement on the same attention economy it critiques. FOMO is the anxiety JOMO addresses — but the platform that produces FOMO also benefits from JOMO content: both create engagement around the act of being (or not being) online. Digital Detox is JOMO’s commercial form. The joy of missing out is sold back to you through the feed.
Why This Matters: JOMO makes visible the recuperation mechanism of the attention economy: critique becomes content, resistance becomes a product, and the platform profits from both the anxiety and its rebranded relief.
Related terms: FOMO · Digital Detox · counter-movements · Slow Media · Doomscrolling · Attention Economy
Read more:
- JOMO: The Original Post — Dash, A. (2012). anildash.com
- Motivational, emotional, and behavioral correlates of fear of missing out — Przybylski, A.K. et al. (2013). Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology