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Even though Psychology Today wrote about the “Joy of Missing Out” back in July,  I learned of the hashtag for it– #JOMO — this morning on Twitter thanks to Techno Claus @Pogue.  (Hang on, this will unfold into something worthy of #grappling. )  😎

First, tho, you have to know about #FOMO for any of this to make sense.

#FOMO = Fear of Missing Out   Missing what, you might ask…  anything, EVERYTHING!

I first saw a lot of #FOMO references on Twitter last year when Bitcoin (#BTC, #Cryptocurrency) was going wild.  I mean WILD… as in one bitcoin was trading for nearly $20,000.  Now that was a bubble! Geek that I am, I had bought a few — very few–  BTC back in 2015, so I had NO #FOMO. I was literally giddy. Not so much when BTC dropped back to around $3500 a month or so ago. (I could go on and on, but this is drifting far from the JOMO concept… sigh.)

Now I see both #FOMO and #JOMO are much older than I thought.  Here’s a blog post from 2015.

Let’s cut to the chase. The last thing we need heading into a new year is more fear. Most of America has been “hair-on-fire” anxious since 11.9.2016  Every day a new political crisis and more investigations will begin soon… how can we miss those? Oh, no… mo FOMO! So, now more than ever #JOMO — the Joy of Missing Out.  What?

Yes, as Buddhists would say, to change a habit we need an antidote.  Clinical psychologist Ben Michaelis, author of the Life blog (linked above), says;

The opposite of FOMO is capital G, Gratitude.

Gratitude? not Joy? Well, the concept is basically the same and both are a choice. Yes, they are — grapple with that.  (I keep using this term because it’s the title of my forthcoming eBook #grappling.)

Finally, David Pogue (@Pogue aka Techno Claus and soon to be Smarter Living writer @NYTimes) was on @CBS this morning explaining how we can use the #JOMO concept by taking a techno break:

I’ll be sharing more posts and ideas on how to establish healthy habits and ways we can find more joy and less angst in the new year. We can do this!