The FOMO That Won't Let You Enjoy the Plan Has a Way Out

In May 2004, a Harvard Business School student named Patrick McGinnis published a column in his school’s newspaper with a decidedly unacademic observation: most of the invitations circulating on campus got replies from fewer than half of the people invited. His explanation was not lack of interest, but the opposite: nobody wanted to rule anything out in case something better came along.

In that column, McGinnis popularized two acronyms at once. One was FOMO, fear of missing out. The other, which he himself came to consider more important over the years, was FOBO, fear of a better option: the fear that a better option will turn up. Twenty years later, the first acronym has swallowed the second. According to estimates from the search analytics tool Ahrefs, in the United States, where the acronym was born, searches for “fomo” have stayed roughly flat, at around 120,000 a month both in early 2021 and in September 2026, while in Spain they multiplied about seven and a half times over the same period (from about 7,200 to 54,400). In English the word is already settled vocabulary; elsewhere it is still spreading.

Most of what gets written about FOMO treats it as a side effect of social media. The interest here lies elsewhere: how it changes the way a specific plan is experienced, before, during and after. Because what the studies say is that FOMO does not only make us suffer over what we miss. It also makes us enjoy less what we do get to live.

What FOMO is, according to the people who first measured it

Until 2013, FOMO was a word for magazines and trend agencies. That year, psychologist Andrew Przybylski and his colleagues Kou Murayama, Cody DeHaan and Valerie Gladwell published the first serious attempt to measure it in Computers in Human Behavior. Their definition is still the standard one:

FOMO is “a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent”, characterized by “the desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing”.

To build the scale, they started from 32 statements, tested them with 1,013 adults from several countries and kept the 10 that best distinguished between people with a lot of FOMO and people with little. Some of them are worth reading, because they work almost like a mirror:

• “I fear my friends have more rewarding experiences than me.”
• “It is important that I understand my friends ‘in jokes’.”
• “When I miss out on a planned get-together it bothers me.”
• “When I have a good time it is important for me to share the details online (e.g. updating status).”
• “When I go on vacation, I continue to keep tabs on what my friends are doing.”

None of them mentions phones or screen time. They talk about plans, groups and conversations. The phone is the channel; what people fear missing is social life.

Before the plan: the invitation nobody answers

The first sign of FOMO appears long before anything starts: at the moment of saying yes. This is the territory of McGinnis’s FOBO, and it shows up in very everyday behavior:

• “I’ll let you know” as the default reply to any proposal.
• “Put me down as a maybe”, which leaves the organizer with no idea how many people are coming.
• Confirming two plans at once so you can decide at the last minute.
• Checking what everyone else is doing before committing to anything.

It looks like a strategy for not missing the best option. The problem is what it costs. A 2010 study illustrates this from an unexpected angle: vacations. Jeroen Nawijn and his team measured the happiness of 1,530 Dutch adults, 974 of whom were going on a trip. Those with a vacation ahead of them were happier than the rest before leaving. After the trip, however, the difference almost always disappeared; it only lasted a few weeks after a very relaxed trip.

The takeaway is uncomfortable for FOBO: a large part of the enjoyment of a plan happens before the plan, while waiting for it. And whoever does not commit until the last minute has nothing to look forward to. They avoid the risk of choosing the wrong plan, but give up anticipation, which is the most reliable stretch of the enjoyment.

During the plan: enjoying in comparison

Here is the most revealing finding, and it comes from a science museum in the southeastern United States. One night it was holding an adults-only event: $24 a ticket, 26 interactive activities, a beer tasting and all 400 tickets sold. People were having a great time: the average rating was 6.34 out of 7.

The team of Ceren Hayran, Lalin Anik and Zeynep Gürhan-Canli handed a short text to 67 attendees. Half were told that six other events were taking place in the city that same night, with photos. The other half read something neutral about points of interest in the area. Then they were asked how much money they would accept to leave the museum right then:

• Those who knew nothing about the other plans asked, on average, for $28.30.
• Those who had just learned about the other events would settle for $22: less than they had paid to get in.

Nobody had told them the other plans were better. Knowing they existed was enough for the plan they were in to lose value, while they were enjoying it. The same group also showed less intention of coming back to the museum’s next event.

One detail of the study sets FOMO apart from other emotions: the attendees did not feel more regret than the other group. They did not think they had picked the wrong plan. The plan simply started being measured against the others. FOMO does not say “this is bad”; it says “this, compared with that”.

The team tested the idea again in an office setting. With 74 employees from six companies who were still working after 6 p.m., those who read that there were events in the city that night showed less willingness to work overtime the following week (3.54 versus 4.49 on a 7-point scale) and less satisfaction with their job at that moment, with no differences in mood, envy or feelings of exclusion.

After the plan: the loyalty that never comes

The effect does not stay on the night of the event. In a third test, Hayran’s team reminded students in a summer course about the vacations other classmates were having. Those who read about those vacations showed less intention to repeat the course the following year: 4.05 versus 5.17 out of 7.

That is why the paper’s title speaks of loyalty. FOMO explains a pattern almost everyone recognizes in their own circle of friends: the bar everyone liked and nobody ever goes back to, the festival that was “amazing” and gets swapped for another one the next year, the dinner that worked and is never repeated. When every plan is judged against the full range of possibilities, none of them earns the right to be repeated.

One important caveat: these studies measured intentions, not what people actually did afterward. And all the alternatives took place at the same time as the plan. What they show is the direction of the effect, not its size in any one person’s real life.

FOMO keeps a schedule

If FOMO depended only on temperament, it would show up the same at any hour. It does not. Marina Milyavskaya and her team followed first-year students over a semester, with questions throughout the day and a diary every night. FOMO came up often, but not at random:

• More at the end of the day than in the morning.
• More at the end of the week than at the beginning.
• More while doing something obligatory, such as studying or working.

It is the scene of Friday afternoon with the laptop open while the group chat fills up with photos. FOMO spikes precisely when your own plan is an obligation and someone else’s is leisure. This matches what the original 2013 study found with 87 university students: those with the most FOMO were also the ones who checked Facebook most during class.

Who feels it most (and who feels it least)

FOMO varies a lot from one person to another, and not at random. In Przybylski’s second study, with a representative sample of 2,079 British adults aged 22 to 65, two clear patterns emerged:

• It declines with age. The correlation was -0.37. A later meta-analysis by Mehdi Akbari and his team, which pooled 85 studies and 55,134 people, confirmed the trend, somewhat more mildly (-0.19).
• Young men scored higher. The difference between the sexes existed only among young people and disappeared at older ages.

The most interesting finding, however, is a different one. Przybylski drew on the self-determination theory of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, which proposes that people function better when three basic needs are met:

• Autonomy: feeling that what you do is your own choice.
• Competence: feeling capable of doing well what you do.
• Relatedness: feeling close to other people.

People whose three needs were less well met in daily life showed more FOMO (β = -0.25). The idea, which connects with what is known about intrinsic motivation, is suggestive: FOMO grows where your own plan does not feel chosen, does not make you feel capable or does not bring you closer to anyone. Then any other plan looks better.

A note on the figures. A correlation of 0.37 or 0.41 points to a clear trend but is far from a rule: there are plenty of young people with hardly any FOMO and plenty of older people with quite a lot. Besides, almost all of these studies rely on a single measurement, so they do not allow us to say what causes what.

The screen as a shop window of plans

Social media did not invent FOMO, but it puts it on display. In the past, finding out about the plan you had missed required someone to tell you about it the next day. Now it arrives live, with a photo and a location, while you are at your own plan. It is exactly the manipulation from the museum experiment, repeated every night on millions of phones.

The data back this up. In Akbari’s meta-analysis, FOMO was associated with more internet use (r = 0.41), and the association was stronger in studies carried out after the pandemic (0.54 versus 0.38). Another 2024 meta-analysis, by Mingxuan Du and colleagues, covering 172 studies and more than 250,000 people, compared four forms of anxiety and found that FOMO was the one most closely linked to hard-to-control social media use (r ≈ 0.50).

And the 2013 study added a nuance that explains many people’s ambivalent relationship with their phone: people with more FOMO felt, when using Facebook, more positive and more negative emotions at the same time. The shop window attracts and annoys all at once.

The way out: what sets apart those who do enjoy the plan

The studies do not prescribe anything, but they do sketch quite clearly where FOMO loses its grip. Four patterns keep coming up.

1. A plan is experienced worse when you know about the others. At the museum, the only difference between the two groups was the information about the other events. The plan, the beer and the activities were the same. Those who did not have that shop window in front of them valued what they were experiencing more. Enjoyment did not depend only on the plan, but on what it was being compared against.

2. Committing gives back half the enjoyment. If a good part of the pleasure lies in the waiting, as the vacation study showed, saying yes early is not a loss of options: it is gaining days of anticipation. FOBO protects against the mistake of choosing badly at the price of having nothing to look forward to.

3. FOMO has moments, not just people. Knowing that it shows up more on Fridays, at night and in the middle of obligations makes it possible to recognize it as a reaction to context and not as a reliable sign that you are missing out on life.

4. Where there is choice, capability and connection, there is less FOMO. This is the underlying conclusion of the 2013 study. The plans you have truly chosen, where you feel at ease and are with people close to you, are precisely the ones that least need to be compared with anything. It is also what makes local festivals feel so intense: for a few days, the plan belongs to everyone.

FOMO, FOBO and JOMO: three ways of being in a plan

In recent years a third term has caught on, JOMO (joy of missing out): the pleasure of staying out by choice. It deserves an honest assessment: there is no scale or line of research behind it as there is with FOMO; the meta-analyses mention it only as a counterconcept. But it helps complete the map.

	FOMO	FOBO	JOMO
Where attention goes	To the plan you are not experiencing	To the plan that might still turn up	To the plan you have chosen
What happens to the invitation	Accepted, but lived looking elsewhere	Left up in the air	Accepted or declined without drama
What happens to enjoyment	Measured in comparison	Anticipation is lost	Lived on its own terms
Scientific backing	Validated scale and hundreds of studies	McGinnis’s term, little studied	Cultural concept

If you recognize yourself in the first column, it is worth remembering that research describes tendencies, not destinies. And that the opposite trait is not isolation: openness to experience, for example, drives people to try new things without needing to live them all at once.

What science does not know yet

FOMO is a young concept, and the data should be read with caution:

• Almost everything is correlational. We know FOMO goes hand in hand with certain behaviors, but not always what causes what.
• It is measured through self-report. People describe how they feel; nobody observes their FOMO directly.
• Results vary a lot between studies. The meta-analyses cited find very high heterogeneity, meaning the size of the effect changes depending on the sample and the country.
• Hayran’s experiments use small samples and measure intentions, not later behavior.

What does seem solid is the central idea: FOMO is not only missing what you do not experience, but comparing what you do. If you are curious about how you relate to plans and to other people, the introvert or extrovert test, the what kind of friend are you quiz and the routine or spontaneity quiz offer guidance, not a diagnosis. And if you have ever been left out without choosing it, the article on ostracism explains why that really hurts.

Sources

• Akbari, M., Seydavi, M., Palmieri, S., Mansueto, G., Caselli, G. & Spada, M. M. (2021). Fear of missing out (FoMO) and internet use: A comprehensive systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 10(4), 879-900. https://doi.org/10.1556/2006.2021.00083
• Deci, E. L. & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. New York: Plenum.
• Du, M., Zhao, C., Hu, H. et al. (2024). Association between problematic social networking use and anxiety symptoms: a systematic review and meta-analysis. BMC Psychology, 12, 263. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-024-01705-w
• Hayran, C., Anik, L. & Gürhan-Canli, Z. (2020). A threat to loyalty: Fear of missing out (FOMO) leads to reluctance to repeat current experiences. PLOS ONE, 15(4), e0232318. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0232318
• McGinnis, P. J. (2004, May). Social theory at HBS: McGinnis’ two FOs. The Harbus.
• Milyavskaya, M., Saffran, M., Hope, N. & Koestner, R. (2018). Fear of missing out: prevalence, dynamics, and consequences of experiencing FOMO. Motivation and Emotion, 42, 725-737. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-018-9683-5
• Nawijn, J., Marchand, M. A., Veenhoven, R. & Vingerhoets, A. J. (2010). Vacationers happier, but most not happier after a holiday. Applied Research in Quality of Life, 5(1), 35-47.
• Przybylski, A. K., Murayama, K., DeHaan, C. R. & Gladwell, V. (2013). Motivational, emotional, and behavioral correlates of fear of missing out. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(4), 1841-1848. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2013.02.014