Meaning
Acronym for 'joy of missing out': the pleasure of skipping an event, staying in, or unplugging from social media without feeling anxious about what everyone else is doing. Informal, positive term from internet and wellness culture, used as the contented counterpart to FOMO. Informal and unapologetically positive; often deployed to justify cancelling plans. Regional use: General English online; strongest in wellness, tech, and lifestyle writing.
Origin
Tech writer Anil Dash is the person the record credits: his blog post 'JOMO!', published on 19 July 2012 after a month spent mostly offline following the birth of his son, declared 'This is the Joy of Missing Out' and framed the feeling as the answer to FOMO, the fear-of-missing-out acronym coined by Patrick McGinnis in a 2004 Harvard Business School magazine piece that Dash's post responded to. The term spread through tech and wellness commentary across the 2010s as a counter-slogan to always-on culture. One wrinkle: Wikipedia's article on FOMO, citing a Washington Post piece, dates an early use of JOMO to 2004, so Dash's claim to the very first use is not airtight, though he is the documented populariser.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- JOMO moment
- joy of missing out
Usage Examples
- She skipped the afterparty without a flicker of guilt: pure JOMO.
- Turning off notifications gave him his first taste of JOMO in months.
- Their JOMO weekend involved a locked front door and absolutely no group chats.