FOMO: FEAR OF MISSING OUT

Take the FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) test: Do you ever get stressed out when you come across those delightful (read: highly selective, filtered, and cropped) photos posted by friends, family, and celebrities to your social media feed? As you scroll, you feel a sense of anxiety. While you're sitting there playing with your phone, these people are living lives that are far more interesting, exciting, successful, and frankly, Instagrammable than yours?

This feeling is called FOMO, short for Fear of Missing Out, and its effects are widespread. Surveys have found that 56% of people are afraid of missing out on events, news, and important status updates if they are away from social networks. With more than two billion people worldwide now using social media, that means that over one billion people currently suffer from FOMO. The extent of the epidemic is vast. It's changing the way we live so drastically that it sort of feels like we're evolving into a new species: FOMO Sapiens.

As Patrick, host of the hit podcast presented by Harvard Business Review, elaborates on the subject of FOMO (a term he coined) and its ubiquity in advertising, social media and popular culture, he explores how FOMO represents much more than a catchy, hashtag-able millennial catchphrase. FOMO is a powerful, persistent and widespread mindset that causes stress, insecurity, jealousy, and even depression in individuals in its sway. Patrick himself struggles with these feelings and his goal in this book is to examine how FOMO inserts itself into all the dimensions of our daily lives, and how we can learn to manage FOMO and lessen its impact.

Patrick also links in FOMO's noxious relative, FOBO (“Fear of a Better Option”), the anxiety that something better will come along, which makes it undesirable to commit to existing alternatives when making a decision. FOBO is a “neurosis driven by abundance that drives you to keep all your options open and to hedge your bets. As a result, you live in a world of maybes, stringing yourself and others along for as long as possible. When you treat your life like a tinder feed, swiping right with reckless abandon without ever committing to any of the potential options, you turn everything around you, from opportunities to individuals, into commodities.” The effects are possibly even worse than those of FOMO because while FOMO is primarily an internal struggle, FOBO also affects and alienates you from your friends, business associates and family, delivering everyone to a tangled world of hypotheticals, calculations, and trade-offs.

FOMO and FOBO are both shaping our society in myriad insidious ways that are highly problematic, and when combined, we can end up paralyzed, unable to choose and act, with a critical case of FODA – “Fear of Doing Anything.”

We all are startig to question many of the underlying premises and promises of the social media revolution and finding a dark side lurking below the manic memes and hashtags that needs to be challenged. Writing with urgency, vision and brio, Patrick is opening a window on a pervasive condition that affects a huge number of people in their personal and business relationships – filled with real life stories, current research, and personal insights, Fear of Missing Out is provocative, timely and highly persuasive in defining a cultural ethos of our digital-driven age and calling for change. There is no similar book on the market or in the works.

Patrick J. McGinnis is a writer, speaker and venture capitalist and private equity investor who has invested in leading companies in the United States, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. He is the author of The 10% Entrepreneur: Live Your Startup Dream Without Quitting Your Day Job, published by Portfolio in 2016. His hit podcast, FOMO Sapiens is backed by Harvard Business Review. Here is a link:
http://patrickmcginnis.com/fomosapiens/

Patrick has spoken on FOMO, FOBO, and 10% Entrepreneurship throughout the United States and in Brazil, El Salvador, Ireland, Jamaica, Jordan, Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco, Mozambique, Peru, Portugal, Uganda, and the UK. He's spoken at organizations including: Google, Viacom, ipsy, The World Bank, Ivy – The Social University, How to Academy, Harvard Business School, The Wharton School, University College Dublin,
Instituto Tecnológico de Mexico, University of Amman, Cambridge University, and Georgetown University.

Patrick is credited with coining the term “FOMO” or “fear of missing out,” which was added to the Oxford Dictionary in 2013. His original article on the topic, written while at Harvard Business School, was printed in the 2016 in the “Fear” issue of Lapham's Quarterly alongside pieces by Sigmund Freud, Nadine Gordimer, Joseph Heller, Václav Havel, and Thomas Hobbes. A graduate of Georgetown University and Harvard Business School, Patrick has visited more than 80 countries and is fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, and French.