FOMO – Fear of missing out
JOMO – Joy of missing out
A report in the Economic Times has coined a new acronym NEMO (Nearly but not fully Missing Out).
Last month, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, announced a host of features for its upcoming products under the digital wellbeing umbrella while addressing the audience at the tech giant’s annual I/O conference. Finding a balance between FOMO and JOMO was key to his speech as well. Android Dashboard — a kind of analytics tool for your digital life, capable of telling you how often you unlocked your phone on any given day, and how much time you spent with which apps.
A balance that, ironically enough, even the makers of apps like Moment and Freedom are striving to achieve. Everyone is indeed on a quest towards finding their NEMO.
FOMO (fear of missing out) and JOMO (joy of missing out) are two extremes. The balance between the two can be NEMO (Nearly but not fully Missing Out).
Nikhil Jois was always online. The 28-year-old, who joined almost every social network, believed that “your network is your net worth”.
“In my vanity, I thought that everyone wanted to know where I had that masala dosa. I was craving for validation. I wouldn’t just post something, I would wait to see who likes it, who laughs at my jokes and who is jealous of me,” says the Bengaluru-based tech entrepreneur.
It soon became a vicious loop that he couldn’t escape. He had a fair idea of what addiction meant, and social media had begun to feel like one.
“I put on weight, got unusually stressed and unnecessarily angry. I wasn’t looking good or feeling good.” He tried turning off his mobile notifications and uninstalling some of the apps but eventually ended up logging on to them from his desktop. “It was like I was trying to sneak past myself.”
Then, in April 2017, Jois asked his brother to change all his social media passwords and not disclose them to him. “That really worked wonders for my health and productivity,” he says.
It’s been a year since and he claims he is no longer a social-media addict. “I sleep better. I feel healthier. I have regained two hours of reading time a day.” The web browser app on his cellphone has been replaced with Kindle just so he reads more long-form writing than bite-sized content. “I still get FOMO once in a while, though,” he says.
43% digital users across the world say they would much rather stay away from their phone for a week than from their family. This is as per a real-time study by Motorola.
FOMO, or the fear of missing out, is a two-decade-old phenomenon acronymised by a Harvard MBA, Patrick J McGinnis, in 2002, and bandied about by every third digital literate since 2014. FOMO is a feeling that if one is not online, one might miss out on what others are experiencing, learning or talking about.
People suffering from FOMO are tethered to their digital devices and are often found rigorously posting their life updates, and liking and commenting on other people’s posts. Some of them passively scroll through social timelines to see what everyone’s up to.
Jois curbs FOMO by meeting people in person instead of going down the online rabbit hole. He’s moving towards JOMO, he believes. JOMO, or the joy of missing out, is a relatively positive belief that cutting off all social media and digital devices can be blissful. It was reportedly coined in 2012 by the American blogger and tech entrepreneur Anil Dash who briefly switched off his devices and went offline after the birth of his son.
FOMO and JOMO are the two ends of a spectrum that includes other social media-borne emotions like FOJI (fear of joining in), MOMO (mystery of missing out), SLOMO (slow to missing out). To Karthik Srinivasan, a communications and digital marketing consultant, JOMO is more a glamourisation of privilege. It’s meant for people who can afford to miss out on opportunities and leads that social media has on offer.
Jois is an ideal example of NEMO now. He is away from most online networks but hasn’t turned into a social media recluse. He occasionally logs into Facebook to run an ad for his digital agency. He follows a select set of people on Twitter to get a lowdown on what’s happening in the world.
There are social media addicts who would post 10 Instagram Stories a day. Now they do about one a day. Complete social media shutdown is not possible, according to them.
Pankaj Malani, head of content at tech startup Dailyhunt, is a NEMO cadet, too. He quit Facebook four months ago because he couldn’t keep up with the stream of “fake happiness”. “People were getting married, having kids, going on vacations; it’s as if their lives were perfect when in reality I knew it was far from it.”
However, social media has also proved to be a great tool for him at work. “Every time I need a voice-over guy, a small-time actor, a translator, I just tweet it out and find someone within minutes.”
A lot of people depend on social platforms professionally, says Amrita Clements, a Mumbai-based clinical psychologist and marriage and family therapist. A majority of them also try to perfect their image on social media. “Social media has proved to be an amazing tool to connect the older generation but has made the younger generation in big cities even lonelier.” 80% of her patients recognise its role in changing their behaviour and causing them anxiety and depression.
Instead of asking them to clamp down on a behaviour, she puts them on the path of NEMO. “I tell them to create boundaries: avoid logging in when they are in a bad mood because it may end up making it worse.”
The middle path propagated by NEMO is finding takers around the world. According to Socialreport.com’s March 2018 report, around 400 million Facebook users are taking a social media detox on a monthly basis, as opposed to a blanket ban. Apps to help people track mobile usage or keep from distractions have come up.
In 2014, Kevin Holesh created an iOS app called Moment to check his device addiction. The app, at 5.3 million downloads right now, tracks your iPhone and iPad usage and sets daily usage limits so you don’t waste time on the gadgets. In-app purchases range from Rs 200 to Rs 2,000. 6% of its user base is from India. “It’s been a wild ride,” says the Pittsburgh-based UI-UX designer who has seen a 100% year-on-year growth in user base in the last four years.
He sees a huge boost in sales early January because of New Year resolutions. The concern around data privacy after the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica debacle was also good for business, he says.
While the future is certainly mobile-based, the highly productive times of many are often on desktop. In 2009, a North Carolina-based tech company called Freedom created an eponymous software that could be used across mobile phones and desktops to block distracting websites and apps as per the user’s wish. A tenth of its 750,000 users are from India, says Fred Stutzman, founder of Freedom.
Neither Stutzman nor Holesh is a proponent of JOMO. “It is unrealistic to expect people to go smartphone-free. Limiting yourself to two hours on the phone daily is a good place to start with,” says Holesh.
JOMO may have been called the next big trend, but it is actually NEMO that is turning out to be a potential global industry, with the emergence of a raft of phone-tracking and meditation apps that helps you have a balanced digital life.
Digital wellbeing is being turned into an experiential business too. A weekend of digital detox retreat at select tourist locations across the world ranges between $200 and $4,000.
In India, even the internet de-addiction centres in metros don’t talk about completely cutting off social media and digital devices. “Complete abstinence will be met by complete resistance. We have to reduce the dysfunctional part of one’s behaviour that leads to addiction,” says Dr Manoj Kumar Sharma, a clinical psychologist at NIMHANS, who was instrumental in setting up the Services for Healthy Use of Technology (SHUT) clinic under the aegis of the Bengaluru-based medical institution that deals with mental health and neurosciences.
Earlier this year, Arianna Huffington, cofounder of Huffington Post, launched the beta version of a digital wellness app called Thrive in India through the Samsung Galaxy Store and the Google Play store. “We will be officially launching the app in India this summer,” says Danny Shea, head of global expansion at Thrive Global.