26-04-2025
Colin Sheridan: My son's Fomo is so strong, he wants to attend Pope's funeral
I learned a new phrase this week. One that perfectly reflects my current zeitgeist. Jomo — or joy of missing out. It is the antonym of Fomo (fear of missing out), a term which aptly applies to my 10-year-old son, and, if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by, 10-year-olds generally.
He chooses to live life like he's the human embodiment of a Hemingway sentence, wanting to do everything, all the time, and all at once.
Experiencing life to the fullest, etc.
If his life was a book, he's adamant it'll be a bestseller, especially on a mundane Monday in March when there's nothing going on, but he's absolutely convinced there is, and we are missing out on it.
In that context, we had a difficult conversation this week when I explained to him, we wouldn't be flying to Rome for Pope Francis's funeral but would be cutting grass instead.
He loves nothing more than a gathering and the thoughts that other people are having craic in the Vatican will drive him nuts until the white smoke appears and the crowds disperse.
That said, he will placate his need for speed and find some good in the grass cutting.
Though I'm now reformed, I think I'm to blame for his Fomo, because I too was crippled as a kid with wanting to be everywhere, all the time, all at once.
If my brothers were at the bog with my dad, I wanted to be with them. If, on the way to the bog, I passed my friends on the green kicking ball, I'd execute a combat roll out of a moving car to ditch my brothers and join in the football.
I'd beg for hours to have sleepovers with my cousins, and the moment after my parents would call my bluff and leave, I'd run out the gate to give chase lest they go and have some fun without me.
I think it's one of the reasons I liked school so much. I was no star pupil, but, because everyone I knew was there, I was content that nothing of any consequence could be going on anywhere else.
Mercifully, it has softened to the point that social gatherings now represent an opportunity to experience — not Fomo, but Jomo — a very bespoke joy in not being where everyone else is.
It may sound antisocial and introverted, but I revel in the notion that people are going places to do things, and I am not.
I realise the invitations may dry up after this, but when they are first issued (especially by way of hastily convened WhatsApp groups), I don't even get anxious about turning them down.
I feel excited about all the ways I won't go to things. I enjoy plotting my own version of the Irish Exit, one where I don't even show up in the first place.
Maybe I've tested and tasted too much. Maybe, like my son, I went too hard, too fast, too soon, and was burned out by my late 20s.
I consider myself lucky that social media was not for me the narcotic it now is for kids, because Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, are all fuelled by FoMO and the notion that everybody else's life is better than yours, and everyone is having fun in the place you are not.
For me it may have been my brothers at the bog, for teenagers today, it's their friends on a phone screen, seemingly having fun without them.
Recently, Peruvian journalist Guillermo Galdos travelled to the Amazon to document the effect the arrival of the internet (through Elon Musk's Starlink) was having on young indigenous kids, who, until then, had never been online.
Peruvian journalist Guillermo Galdos travelled to the Amazon to document the effect the arrival of the internet was having on young indigenous kids.
The footage of one boy rocking on his hammock scrolling absentmindedly, is oddly jarring.
Of course, we need not travel to the Brazilian rainforest to see evidence of abject brain-rot, but there's something profoundly unsettling in watching a child become hooked on a drug in real time.
I only came to learn in writing this column that FoMO has been a widely discussed phenomenon in medicine and mental health for over 20 years.
Though we make light of it, its worst manifestations present as a range of negative emotions and feelings related to the need to belong.
With social media now so nefariously ubiquitous, maybe it's time we took Jomo more seriously, and intentionally set about equipping our children to seek the joy that can be found in missing out on stuff. Nothing beats being there, so the catchphrase goes, but, depending on the 'there,' I'd beg to differ.
