Lately, my Amazon item-clicking finger has been itchy. and I’ve felt neglected by the Amazon delivery truck.

I may be an Amazon addict, afflicted with a particular variant of FOMO.

Embarrassingly, I’m not being facetious,

An alternate theory to merely being spendy might be that I’m mildly depressed by the dizzying flurry of potentially disastrous medical news – as well as news inside and outside our borders – and a healthy engagement in retail therapy may be the fix.

When the author and speaker Patrick McGinnis coined the term FOMO, he didn’t consider fear a sinister force. He was a wide-eyed business-school student from a small town, surrounded by intellectual, career, and social opportunities. He wanted to say yes to everything, he told me. Once, he tried to go to seven birthday parties in one night. Then 9/11 happened, and he felt an even greater urge to take advantage of every minute. FOMO was a sign of abundant potential—that he could learn, and have meaningful experiences, and each day might be different from the one before. “If you don’t believe there’s a possibility,” he said, “why would you have FOMO?” The 2004 op-ed in which he named the phenomenon gently poked fun at his fellow business students madly juggling invites. He never guessed that more than a decade later, people would be talking about FOMO with such seriousness (nor, I imagine, studying it with grim rigor, publishing studies with titles such as “Fear of Missing Out, Need for Touch, Anxiety and Depression Are Related to Problematic Smartphone Use”).

The world has changed since 2004, though. Social media began feeding the feeling of always being left out of something. Optimization-and-productivity culture encourages the idea that one can engineer their schedule to accommodate the ideal number of enlightening, spiritually fulfilling plans. Then, naturally, a backlash arrived. It might be best summed up by a newer term: JOMO, or the “joy of missing out.” The idea is that you should savor your solitude and fully embrace the choice to do what you want to do rather than what others are doing.

What sources of JOMO replenish you, Constant Reader?