Fear of Missing Out
FOMO
Patrick J. McGinnis was a student at Harvard Business School in 2004 when he wrote the piece that produced the acronym, an op-ed for the school magazine The Harbus under the title Social Theory at HBS: McGinnis' Two FOs.
Featured in
The title names two. The second is FOBO, fear of a better option, and the article was about the role of both in the school's social life. One of them became a word used in hundreds of news articles and as a hashtag, and the other did not.
The distinction is worth recovering. FOMO is about what is happening elsewhere. FOBO is about the choice in front of a person and the possibility that a better one exists. The first produces attendance and the second produces delay, and a vocabulary carrying both would describe the situation more accurately than one carrying only the first.
Who used fear of missing out before FOMO existed
The marketing strategist Dan Herman used fear of missing out in presentations in the late 1990s and in a paper in 2000 about short-term brands, where a motivation for trying such brands was described as an ambition to exhaust all possibilities and the fear of missing out on something.
Before the internet, the related phenomenon was keeping up with the Joneses. What changed was the supply. Once most of a life is posted somewhere and reachable by anyone, the same comparison runs continuously and against everybody at once.
Why social media drives FOMO rather than hosting it
The mechanism is a sampling problem and the material states it precisely. Social networking offers a view into an endless stream of activities a person is not involved in, and the common tendency is to post about positive experiences, a good restaurant, rather than negative ones, a bad first date.
A feed is therefore not a distorted view of other people's lives. It is an accurate view of the parts they chose to publish, and those parts were chosen by the same rule everywhere.
Relative deprivation is named as the process creating the fear and the dissatisfaction. A 2012 survey found eighty-three per cent of respondents reporting information overload, too much to watch and read, and around forty per cent of people aged twelve to sixty-seven said social media had raised their fear of missing out.
What need goes unmet underneath FOMO
Self-determination theory holds that psychological satisfaction rests on three needs: competence, autonomy and relatedness. Subjects with lower levels of basic psychological satisfaction reported higher levels of FOMO, which places the fear downstream of an unmet need rather than beside it.
A study in 2013 found mood and satisfaction with life both worse where it was present, self-esteem lower, and mindfulness disturbed. Four in ten young people reported it sometimes or often. It thins out as people get older, and more men than women said they had it.
The personality findings are specific. Score higher and three things tend to come with it:
- wanting status more
- competing harder against people of the same sex
- preferring relationships that do not last
On a college campus, experiencing it on a given day produced higher fatigue that day, and experiencing it across a semester produced higher stress.
What FOMO does to sleep and screen habits
Four hundred and sixty-seven adolescents surveyed by the University of Glasgow in 2019 described a pressure they felt came from everyone around them: never be unreachable.
John M. Grohol describes the behavioural consequence as a constant search for new connections, with current ones abandoned in order to pursue them, which turns a fear of missing out into a mechanism for actually missing things.
The habits named are concrete: increased screen time, checking social media during school, texting while driving. The social version has its own word, phubbing: turning away from somebody actually in the room in favour of a screen. Multiple studies find a negative correlation between hours of sleep and level of FOMO, attributed among students to how many social interactions happen late at night on campuses.
How FOMO works in games and in markets
In video games the term covers the anxiety of missing limited-time items or activities, battle passes among them. The items are often cosmetic, and the material explains why that does not make them trivial: they reflect a player's skill to others and become a marker of standing in the community, so failing to acquire one can lead to social exclusion.
In business, hype and trends can lead leaders to invest on perceptions of what others are doing rather than on their own strategy, which is the bandwagon effect: a person sees others doing something, concludes it must be important because everyone is doing it, may not understand it and may not agree with it, and participates anyway to avoid being left out.
Cryptocurrency investing is named as the clearest financial case, driven by the prominence of people who made large sums.
Told apart
Often confused with Fear of Missing Out
- DoomscrollingFear of missing out is one of the three named explanations for doomscrolling rather than a separate behaviour, converting into sustained exposure through repeated refreshing.
- Fear of Being Without a PhoneBoth concern continuous connection and the phone is the instrument in each. One fears losing the device and the other fears what happens in its absence.
- Fear of Making DecisionsFOBO, coined in the same article as FOMO, is a fear of committing to a choice while a better option might exist, which is the decision-side half of the same difficulty.
Common questions
Questions about FOMO
- Who coined FOMO?
- Patrick J. McGinnis, in a 2004 op-ed titled Social Theory at HBS: McGinnis' Two FOs in The Harbus, the magazine of Harvard Business School, where he was a student. The phrase fear of missing out had been used earlier by the marketing strategist Dan Herman in late 1990s presentations and in a 2000 paper on short-term brands.
- What is FOBO?
- Fear of a better option, coined in the same article and never adopted. FOMO concerns what is happening elsewhere and FOBO concerns the choice in front of a person and whether something better exists. The first produces attendance and the second produces delay, and only one of them entered the language.
- Why does social media produce it?
- Because of what gets posted. A feed offers a view into an endless stream of activities a person is not part of, and the common tendency is to post positive experiences rather than negative ones. That is not a distorted view of other people's lives but an accurate view of the parts they chose to publish, filtered by the same rule everywhere.
- Who reports it most?
- Four in ten young people report it sometimes or often. It correlates negatively with age, and men were more likely than women to report it. People with higher levels tend to have a stronger desire for high social status, to be more competitive with others of the same gender, and to be more interested in short-term relationships.
- Does it make people miss things?
- John M. Grohol describes exactly that consequence: a constant search for new connections with current ones abandoned in order to pursue them. The named habits are increased screen time, checking social media during school and texting while driving, and phubbing is the social form.
- Why do cosmetic items in games cause it?
- Because they are not decorative in effect. Limited-time items reflect a player's skill to other players and become a marker of standing within the community, so failing to acquire one can lead to social exclusion. The scarcity is designed and the consequence is social.
Added 2026-08-23 · Revised 2026-08-26
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Related entries
- DoomscrollingDoomscrolling is reading bad news past the point where it helps. The word arrived in 2018, the behaviour was measured in the 1970s as mean world syndrome.
- Fear of Being Without a PhoneThe Oxford English Dictionary records nomophobia from 1803, meaning fear of laws. The phone version is a portmanteau produced by a survey in 2008.
- Fear of Making DecisionsWalter Kaufmann coined it in 1973, and the argument comes from Kierkegaard: the freedom to make a decision that may change us is what breeds the anxiety.
- Phantom Phone VibrationsMichael Rothberg calls it a tactile hallucination, and up to nine in ten people get it. The sensation has to be learned first, over one month to a year.
- CounterphobiaThe minority response to anxiety seeks the feared thing out. Fenichel's warning is the useful part: dismantling the defence is only the first step of treatment.
- Eco-AnxietyNot a diagnosis, and the researchers say so before anything else. Two people are credited with the name, and every figure in circulation is self-described.