The Joy of Missing Out: In Defence of Absence

by Dr. Ruba Zeidan 

Photo: AI-generated

There is a word we lack in most languages; a word for the feeling of being exactly where you want to be, doing precisely what you chose, with no gravitational pull toward anywhere else. We have assembled entire vocabularies for its opposite. We have built industries, economies, whole architectures of digital life around its opposite. But the thing itself, that rare, settled sufficiency, that quiet fullness, resists naming, and so resists pursuit. 

We did eventually find a name for it, though. An awkward acronym, as it happens: JOMO. The Joy of Missing Out. It arrived as a gentle rebuttal to FOMO, the Fear of Missing Out, which had, by then, become one of the defining emotional conditions of connected life. A low-grade, chronic restlessness. The sensation that life is happening at full volume just outside the room you're in, and that your job is to get there before it ends. 

I know that sensation well. For a long time, I mistook it for ambition. 

But something has been shifting. Quietly at first, then with increasing visibility. A generation that grew up entirely inside social media, that learned to perform adolescence for an audience, to measure worth in engagement metrics, to experience life through the lens of how it would look posted, is now, in remarkable numbers, walking back toward the door. Not dramatically. Not with manifestos. Just logging off. Putting the phone face down. Choosing, with a deliberateness that their predecessors rarely needed, to simply not be there. 

This is not a fringe movement. Surveys across Europe and North America consistently show declining trust in social platforms, rising rates of voluntary disengagement, and a growing cultural appetite for what researchers are calling "digital minimalism." Gen Z, the generation that was supposed to be most native to this world, is leading the retreat. They grew up watching the promise of connection curdle into comparison, authenticity commodified into content, and friendship mediated through algorithms designed not for their wellbeing but for their attention. They are not naive about what these platforms are. And increasingly, they are not interested in pretending otherwise. 

JOMO, then, is not a wellness trend. It is a response, thoughtful if still tentative, to a specific and documented disillusionment. The question worth asking is not whether opting out is fashionable, but what it means to opt back into your own life. 

JOMO is not simply FOMO's opposite. It is something more deliberate, more philosophically interesting than that. FOMO is reactive. It measures your life against a highlight reel of other lives and finds yours lacking. JOMO, by contrast, is a posture. It is the conscious decision to be fully present in what you have chosen, rather than half-present in everything you haven't. 

The distinction matters because I spent years confusing busyness with aliveness. I treated my calendar like a scoreboard. I said yes to things not because I wanted them, but because declining felt like admitting something: that I was tired, or unsociable, or somehow falling behind in a race I couldn't name. I moved through a lot of experiences without actually inhabiting any of them. I was there, technically. But I was already thinking about what came next. 

We carry devices that make every moment a potential broadcast, every experience a candidate for documentation. The pressure to participate in conversations, trends, events, opinions is not social anymore in the old sense. It is built into the platforms we use, the notifications we receive, and the metrics that tell us how visible we are. In this context, choosing not to participate is not passivity. It is a small act of sovereignty. 

The philosophers were here before us. The Stoics spoke at length about the discipline of desire, not the suppression of wanting, but the careful curation of what we allow ourselves to want. Epictetus drew a sharp line between what is up to us and what is not. Most of what FOMO is made of falls firmly in the second category: other people's choices, other people's gatherings, other people's versions of a good life. To measure yourself against these things is to hand the controls of your own contentment to strangers. 

I've done that more times than I'd like to admit. 

Pascal, writing in seventeenth-century France, observed that all of humanity's problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. He meant it as a diagnosis. But there is a prescription lurking inside it. The capacity to be alone, genuinely and willingly alone, is not a symptom of antisocialism or failure. It is a form of maturity. It is the sign that you have developed an interior life rich enough to keep you company. 

What JOMO offers, at its best, is the rediscovery of that interior life. And in my experience, it tends to arrive not as a grand revelation but as something quieter: the realization, midway through an unhurried evening, that you are not waiting for it to be over. 

This is not a romantic argument for hermitage. I still attend parties, still check my phone more than I should, still feel the occasional stab of envy at someone else's weekend. Human beings are social creatures, and connection is not something to be philosophized away. The question is not whether to participate in life, but how much of your participation is genuinely chosen and how much is driven by a fear of what others might think of your absence. 

There is a thought experiment I keep returning to. Imagine two versions of a Saturday afternoon. In the first, you decline an invitation because you are tired, and spend the evening reading or cooking or simply sitting in silence, but you spend half of it checking to see what you're missing, reassuring yourself that nothing important is happening without you. In the second version, you make the same choice, but you actually inhabit it. You read the book all the way through. You taste what you're cooking. You let the silence be silence. 

The first version is not rest. It is FOMO wearing a bathrobe. The second is something rarer: genuine presence in a chosen absence. I know the difference now, not because I've mastered it, but because I've felt both. And only one of them actually restores you. 

We live in an attention economy whose full implications we are only beginning to absorb. In an attention economy, your distraction is a product. Your FOMO is not an unfortunate side effect of social media. It is, in many cases, the intended output. Platforms are engineered to make you feel that you are always slightly behind, always on the verge of missing something irreplaceable. The scroll has no natural endpoint. The feed never empties. The sense of incompleteness is, by design, never resolved. 

What is new, and this is why the current moment feels different, is that people are beginning to name this mechanism out loud, and to refuse it. Not all at once, and not without difficulty. But the refusal is real. When a twenty-two-year-old deletes Instagram not because she has been told to, but because she has looked clearly at what it was doing to her sense of self and decided it wasn't worth it, that is not a lifestyle choice. That is a form of critical thinking applied to daily life. It is, in its modest way, an act of intellectual courage. 

To practice JOMO in this climate is to opt out of a system that was never designed with your flourishing in mind. It is to say: I am not available for indefinite comparison. I am not a feed waiting to be refreshed. I am a person, in a particular place, at a particular time, and this, whatever this is, is enough. 

That last word is the hard one. Enough. I don't think I was ever really taught to feel it. Enough implies a limit, and limits, in a culture of optimization and expansion, feel uncomfortably close to defeat. But limits are also what give shape to a life. A song is not diminished by its ending. A meal is not a failure because it concludes. The moments I remember most clearly are rarely the busiest ones. They are the ones in which I was fully, quietly present. 

There is a kind of courage in missing out. Not the dramatic courage of refusal, but the quieter courage of simply not needing to be everywhere. Of trusting that a life lived carefully, in one place, at one time, is enough. Of believing, against everything the algorithm implies, that what you are doing right now has value even if no one is watching. 

The philosopher Simone Weil wrote that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. She was writing about attention toward other people, but I think the principle extends inward. To pay attention to your own life, to what you actually feel, want, notice, love, is a form of generosity toward yourself. It is also, in this particular moment in history, an act of quiet resistance. 

We struggle to name that settled sense of sufficiency. But I think most of us, in our better moments, already know what it feels like. The generation now walking away from their screens may not have the language for it yet. But they are learning, in the most direct way possible, what it means to choose your life over the performance of it. That, I think, is worth paying attention to. 

Dr. Ruba Zeidan is a Jordanian academic, writer, and media researcher. She is a professor of Digital Media at Al-Balqa Applied University in Jordan and currently serves as Head of the Communications Department at the university. Her work explores the relationship between media, identity, and digital culture in the Arab world, with a particular interest in media discourse, audience behaviour, and the ways narratives shape public perception and collective memory. Alongside her academic work, she writes and comments on media, culture, and contemporary social issues.