Personal essays
Replacing Fear with Joy
FOMO
JOMO
A year later Anil Dash introduced the term JOMO, or Joy of Missing Out.
He said that one of the hardest things about moving to New York City is, “You’re going to miss stuff. On any given day, in New York City, there’s an event going on that would be the best event of the year back in your hometown. And most of the time, you’re not going to be there.”
There are many reasons you don’t end up going. You may not know about it til it’s too late, you didn’t get a ticket, you couldn’t afford a ticket, or you just didn’t feel like going.
Whatever you do instead, Dash writes, “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 that you might have loved to, but are simply skipping.”
This is the Joy of Missing Out.
And Dash says that it has nothing to do with technology. FOMO and JOMO existed long before the internet. In fact, if you look at Fake’s article that coined the term FOMO, her first example is about being at a party and deciding you’re at the wrong party and heading to one you’re sure will be better.
Dash says in describing JOMO that he now more often says “no” than “yes” to invitations and seldom regrets not going.
I have to say that rereading this was very timely for me.
I sat at home last night on the first night of Passover and enjoyed a quiet dinner on my own.
I loved hosting seders for fifteen to twenty people and filling my house with people that would celebrate together.
But this year, I just didn’t feel like it.
I was invited to several seders and, had I gone, would have certainly enjoyed them. But I didn’t go.
I worry that I’m becoming more awkward and anti-social. But perhaps those are just less positive words for my embrace of JOMO.
I worry about not being invited in the future - there’s certainly a risk once you’ve said “no”. We’ll cross that bridge at another time.
JOTTO
And this brings me back to Venkat’s post. He actually posted once when he coined the term FOTTO and then he posted again without the acronym.
He was writing in particular about programmers but Fear of Trying Things out applies more generally.
In addition to removing the acronym he also suggested that perhaps “Reluctance” was a better word than “Fear.”
He wrote that the problem he observes is a “fear of, or rather, the reluctance to try things out.”
Years and years ago Kim and I went to a cooking demonstration by James Peterson. I’m a huge fan of his and loved his book on Sauces and his book on Soups.
Various people assisted him at different times in his demonstration. There was a point at which he was making a gravy and was going to start with a quick roux. He was going to melt some fat, in this case butter, and whisk in an equal part of flour. Once the flour cooks out, you slowly add stock to make a nice gravy.
I was helping him at that point and offered him a balloon whisk and a flat whisk to choose from.
A balloon whisk is the classic shape whereas a flat whisk organizes the curves in a single plane.
He raised an eyebrow and selected the balloon whisk saying, “the flat whisk is new to me and therefor suspect.”
I agree that a public demo may be the wrong place to try something new, but “suspect” took me aback a bit. I nodded and put the flat whisk back in the drawer.
I thought of this when reading Venkat’s advice that, “We need to experiment and prototype a lot more than we allow ourselves to.”
We don’t need to do it in public or in risky situations. But question whether we do things the same way every time because there is sound reason for doing so or if we have a reluctance of trying things out.
I used to host people for New Year’s Eve and cook from a cookbook I’d never cooked from as an excuse to do this in public.
It allowed me to try sous vide one year and boiling pasta in a saucepan with minimal water another.
My favorite was a recipe for making ice cream without an ice cream freezer. You bashed up a bunch of dry ice and added it to the chilled cream mixture and mixed it together for a minute in a KitchenAid.
I’ve never made it again, but I loved the results. The ice cream tickled your tongue in kind of a mild pop-rocks kind of way and gave me a real Joy of Trying Things Out.
I keep that handy right beside my Joy of Missing Out.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 213. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe