During Week 4, I went to my aunt’s house for the weekend. I spent quality time with family, inhaled Indian food and caught my breath after the whirlwind that college has been so far. But, every now and then, I was struck by an odd pang of longing. Like most great things, it was super weird.
It was trippy to see my fellow frosh friends go on with their lives – the routines that were beginning to become my own – without me. Laying in a queen-sized bed at only 11 p.m., about an hour from campus, I found that blurry photos from TDX and texts about the scandalous aftermath made me feel far too many emotions than are warranted for a drunken Snapchat. College had developed a hold on me, only 28 days into the quarter.
In retrospect, I wonder now whether what nagged me more was missing Stanford, or missing out on Stanford.
FOMO, or the Fear Of Missing Out, is an acronym I once thought too funny-sounding and self-pitying to ever become a staple of my slang. However, during my time at Stanford so far, FOMO has emerged as a ubiquitous force.
If I go to bed ‘early’ at 1 am while my friends hang out a while longer, I fear missing out on that conversation that renders a friendship transcendental. If I pass up the opportunity to see a speaker in order to finish an essay, I fear missing out on the role model who could shift the axis of my life plan. As a frosh who still feels tentative about her place at college, the tragicomic acronym looms over almost every decision I make. In this light, going off campus – thereby extricating myself from every aspect of campus life – was a double shot of FOMO, given intravenously.
But as with the espressos that used to make me anxious, FOMO has grown on me. I’ve begun seeing it in a different light: As a paradoxical means of self-care. A small shift in perspective (and spelling) can turn FOMO into JOMO, the Joy of Missing Out.
Indulging in FOMO – something rather instinctive for an angsty teen like myself – inhibits one’s appreciation of the things on which we aren’t missing out. At my aunt’s house I had the most comforting of comfort foods and saw my lovely cousin after nearly a year. We ate chicken wings and watched a Bollywood movie. It was wonderful.
Meanwhile, on campus … Let’s just say that the joy of missing out cannot be understated when what one is missing out on is a post-Friday night bathroom. By learning to see the glass as half-full, FOMO no longer overshadows the JOMO that, by definition, accompanies it.
In a similar vein, FOMO wonderfully rests on the assumption that, for every decision, there exists a lucrative alternative that’s difficult – even fearsome – to miss. With this in mind, FOMO can be a perverse reminder that we enjoy a ridiculous amount of opportunities and possibilities at Stanford. Cool things happen all the time on campus, and regretting not getting to them all should not just be expected, but encouraged. By treating FOMO as an odd exercise in opportunity appreciation, it becomes JOMO.
In a picture from last year’s Wacky Walk, some graduates held a sign quoting Winnie the Pooh. It read: “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” For frosh, who are at the other end – the beginning – of our Stanford journey, very similar words ring true: How lucky are we to have something that makes missing out so hard.
Contact Megha Parwani at mparwani ‘at’ stanford.edu.