The Man Who Created FOMO

"- How did you come up with the term or the phrase or the idea, FOMO. It's a major psychological lever, as I said, in everything we do. So in some ways, it was sitting there just obvious in front of you, but how did you surface and put it into the national consciousness? - When I got to business school, I found myself in an incredible choice-rich environment. So many opportunities, socially, professionally, intellectually, but mostly socially. And I would find that I was triple booked all the time. And I tried to do everything, and I was basically stressed out. It was like, I had all these good things, but I couldn't really enjoy them because I was trying so hard to get to the next thing that I could do that day. And I realized it wasn't just me. It was all of my friends, and we had not just had 9/11, but a lot of us had worked in the tech sector, which blew up in 2000, 2001. So we saw our livelihoods disappear like we've all lost a lot of money. So it was kind of like a little bit like right now where you're like, the world's kind of screwed up. I got to live for every moment. And so, I noticed it was a culture of the school that people would try to do everything and they could barely do that. So I started calling that fear of missing out or FOMO, and I wrote an article way back in 2003 in the school newspaper. 2004, excuse me, in the school newspaper called "Social Theory at HBS: McGinnis' Two FOs."