I came to the joy of missing out by accident, the way most useful things arrive. I was tired one Saturday — tired in a specific, unflattering way that comes from having said yes to too many things in a row — and I cancelled, with apologies, a small dinner I had been looking forward to for weeks. I expected to feel guilty about cancelling. I expected to spend the evening relitigating the choice.

What I actually felt, almost immediately, was an embarrassing amount of relief. I made a simple dinner at home. I read for two hours. I went to bed at nine-thirty. The next day I woke up rested, in a way I had not been rested in a month. And I found myself wondering, with some discomfort, how many of the dinners I'd said yes to in the previous year I would have, given the option, also been quietly relieved to skip.

The honest answer was: a lot of them. Not because the dinners were bad, or the people were bad, or the evenings hadn't been good. They had been fine — most had been better than fine. But the version of me who said yes to all of them was, by the time she got to most of them, depleted. The dinners were eating into a reserve I didn't have. The relief at cancelling one was just the reserve, briefly, getting to refill.

What the term gets right

I don't love the acronym JOMO, which sounds like a marketing campaign for an app, but the underlying observation is real. There is a particular pleasure available in choosing not to be at the thing — in being, deliberately, somewhere else, doing something quieter, while the thing happens without you. The pleasure is the inverse of FOMO, the much-discussed fear that drives so much social behavior. Where FOMO is the anxiety of imagining a better evening happening to someone else, JOMO is the small contentment of knowing the better evening is happening to you.

The word "better" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The better evening is not, on the merits, more exciting. It is not, by social-media-friendly standards, more enviable. It is just, from the inside, more aligned with what you actually had energy for that night. Sometimes that's a dinner. Sometimes that's a bath at eight. The choice between them isn't moral. It's a question of what your specific Tuesday could afford.

What it isn't

JOMO, when it works, is not the same as opting out of social life. It is not introvert triumphalism. It is not the position that going out is bad. I have written essays in this notebook about how much I love long dinners with friends; I still love them. The point of the practice is not to start saying no to everything. The point is to stop saying yes by default.

The version of me who said yes to everything was not, despite appearances, more social. She was, in fact, a worse friend, a worse partner, and a worse dinner companion, because she arrived at every plan slightly tired and partway distracted. The version of me who picks more carefully now, says yes to fewer things, and shows up to those rested — that version is, on average, more present at the events she does attend. Less is a form of more in this very specific way.

The version of me who said yes to everything was not more social. She was a worse friend, a worse partner, and a worse dinner companion, because she arrived at every plan slightly tired.

The thing nobody is missing out on

One of the small intellectual gifts of growing older is realizing how few of the things you were afraid of missing out on were, in fact, worth attending. I am not being cynical here. The good things, when they happened, were good. But the average thing was just a thing. An average dinner. An average party. A book I would have liked but did not need. A movie that did not change my life. The pull I felt to attend, in those years, was vastly larger than the average value of attending.

This is, in part, because the cost of missing was wildly overestimated by my younger mind. I imagined that the things I missed would compound — that my absence from one party meant absence from the next, that my decline of one project meant declines of all the projects, that each "no" was rolling forward into a smaller life. None of this happened. The parties continued. The projects came around again. My friendships did not erode because I missed an event; they eroded, when they did, for entirely different reasons that had nothing to do with my Saturday calendar.

How I practice it now

In a small and slightly boring way. I try to enter each week with one social commitment that I really want to keep, and a willingness to decline anything else that arrives without genuine pull. I no longer try to attend every interesting event in our small social circle. I try to attend the one or two each month that I would, if no one else were going, still want to go to. The rest I let pass.

I have also stopped, almost entirely, attending things out of obligation. This sounds harsh and it isn't. The events I used to attend out of obligation — networking dinners, big group birthdays for people I barely know, work mixers I had no real reason to be at — were not deepening any of those relationships. They were producing slight resentment in me and not very much value for anyone else. Quietly skipping them, with a brief regret to whoever invited me, has cost me almost nothing socially. It has bought me back, on average, four to six evenings a month.

Four to six evenings a month is a lot. It is, more or less, my reading life. It is the difference between someone who finishes a book a month and someone who finishes three. It is the difference between someone who arrives at the dinners she does attend rested and someone who arrives at them slightly resentful. It is, when I add it up across years, an enormous amount of life. And the cost of it was, almost entirely, getting better at one specific skill: declining things I was not going to enjoy, in advance, kindly, without elaborate justification.

A small caveat

JOMO is, I think, very easy to get wrong in the direction of opting out of all engagement. I want to be careful about this. The version of the practice that works is one where you say yes, with full attention, to the things that actually matter to you, and where you decline the rest in order to protect the yeses. The version that doesn't work is the one where you say no to everything because saying yes is hard. That isn't joy. That's avoidance with better branding.

I notice the difference, in my own case, by paying attention to whether I am declining things toward something — toward rest, toward a quieter weekend, toward a book I'm in the middle of, toward an evening with my partner where neither of us has anywhere to be — or whether I'm declining out of pure inertia. Toward something is good. Inertia is a different thing entirely, and I try to catch myself when I'm in it.

What the joy of missing out actually means, I think, is the recognition that your life is not improved by attending more of the things in it. It is improved by attending fewer things, more fully. The Saturday I cancelled the dinner was the start, for me, of a slow correction in that direction. I have been steadily correcting for two years. The friends I love still love me. The dinners I do attend have not lost their pleasure; if anything they have gained it. And the evenings I keep, by saying no to one more thing, turn out to be exactly the evenings I used to wish I had time for.