A new dad wrote a blog post.
Researchers built a scale around it.

JOMO stands for the Joy of Missing Out, and the careful researchers who study it are explicit that it isn't just FOMO with the sign flipped. It's not avoidance. It's not indifference. It's not simply not checking. It's intentional absence paired with genuine contentment, a real, positive state, not the mere absence of anxiety.

That distinction matters more than it looks like it should, because most casual uses of the term treat JOMO as "not having FOMO," which misses what makes it interesting. This page covers where it actually came from, what a decade of research since has found, and where a default-blocked app fits into building the real thing rather than a shallow version of it.

JOMO doesn't exist without FOMO existing first, at least as a named idea. In March 2011, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake published "FOMO and Social Media" on her personal blog, describing FOMO as "a great motivator of human behavior" and calling it central to understanding why social software works the way it does. The post spread widely, especially after being discussed around that year's SXSW conference.

Tech writer Anil Dash answered it directly, over a year later. In July 2012, he published a post simply titled "JOMO!," written a little over a month after his son Malcolm was born, during a stretch where he'd been largely offline and checking almost nothing. His argument: "there can be, and should be, a blissful, serene enjoyment in knowing, and celebrating, that there are folks out there having the time of their life" at something you skipped. He wasn't describing not caring. He was describing being glad for other people's fun without needing to be there for it.

Journalist Christina Crook took the idea much further. Her project began with a 31-day internet fast she documented under the name "Letters from a Luddite," which became the foundation for her 2015 book, The Joy of Missing Out: Finding Balance in a Wired World. The book examines the always-connected world through the lens of what she learned by deliberately stepping away from it.

Crook has since built a coaching framework, The JOMO Method, around the same core idea, aimed at helping people identify which relationships and work actually matter to them, rather than treating every connection and notification as equally worth their attention. Her later work leans specifically on research about the wellbeing benefits of real, in-person relationships, and the costs of toxic hustle and constant digital comparison.

It's tempting to define JOMO as whatever's left over once FOMO is gone, and that framing is specifically the one researchers push back on. JOMO is not avoidance. It is not withdrawal. It is not indifference. It's intentional absence paired with genuine contentment, a state you actively feel, not a gap where anxiety used to be.

That's a real, meaningful difference in practice. Someone who's just numb to what they're missing isn't experiencing JOMO by this definition. Someone who's actively glad to be doing something else, while genuinely aware of what they're skipping, is. The feeling requires both parts: choosing the absence, and feeling good about the choice, not just tolerating it.

A Joy of Missing Out (JoMO) Scale was adapted and validated through confirmatory factor analysis, published in 2025. The study found JoMO positively correlated with mindfulness, and negatively correlated with both FOMO and social media addiction, giving the "opposite of FOMO" framing at least some genuine statistical backing, even if it's not the whole story.

The more interesting finding is about mechanism, not just correlation. JoMO was found to mediate the relationship between self-compassion and mental well-being, meaning part of how being kinder to yourself translates into actually feeling better runs specifically through this capacity to feel good about missing out. Separately, mindfulness was found to mediate the relationship between JOMO and both general social media use and doomscrolling specifically, so higher JOMO tracks with more mindfulness, which itself tracks with less compulsive scrolling.

The scale has since been adapted and re-validated in other populations, including a separate version tested among Iranian university students, suggesting the underlying construct holds up across different cultural contexts, not just the original English-speaking sample.

The screen time app Jomo takes its name directly from this concept, and its philosophy leans into the same idea: missing out on the right things should feel rewarding, not punishing. In practice, though, its mechanics let you earn blocked app time back through actions like hitting a step count, meditating, or finishing a chore, which is a structurally different thing from the research concept of contented, intentional absence. Earning access back through a task is still a negotiation, just a physical one instead of a willpower-based one.

If JOMO requires intentional absence you feel good about, not absence you have to keep re-deciding, then the structure of the block matters as much as the app it's applied to. A system where you can always earn, negotiate, or unlock your way back in keeps the decision alive every single time, which is closer to managing FOMO moment to moment than actually experiencing JOMO.

Fella's apps stay blocked by default, with one 5-minute unlock per session and nothing to trade for more. The absence is already decided before the urge to check ever shows up, which is a closer structural match to what the research describes: a settled, intentional state, not an ongoing negotiation you have to win every time. Whether that produces the specific contented feeling researchers measure is up to the person using it, but the structure at least gets out of its own way.