Fear of Missing Out
Fear of missing out is the anxiety that an absent self is missing a rewarding experience others are having. The term is older than its famous coinage: Dan Herman published it in 2000, and a 2004 student newspaper column popularised the acronym. The research construct arrived later, with Andrew Przybylski and colleagues in 2013, who defined it, built the scale and grounded it in self-determination theory. The scale correlates reliably with heavier social media use and with lower satisfaction of basic psychological needs. The evidence is overwhelmingly cross-sectional self-report and the causal direction is unresolved.
What it is
Przybylski, Kou Murayama, Cody DeHaan and Valerie Gladwell define the construct as a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent, together with the desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing. Their grounding is in self-determination theory: the distress is what unmet relatedness feels like when the evidence of other people's connectedness is constantly visible.
That grounding matters because it credits Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, and popular accounts of the construct regularly reach for self-determination theory without naming them.
This publication's own working model of the commercial version has three forces and is a framework rather than a tested finding. Visibility: you can see what you are missing. Exclusivity: you cannot easily get back in. Momentum: it is happening now. Remove any one and the effect collapses. Combine all three and a room sells out in hours.
One claim that circulates should be handled carefully. A widely quoted line holds that there is no agreed academic definition of the construct, which was fair when the concept was being used loosely by marketers and is no longer the state of the literature. There is a standard research definition and a standard scale, and they are Przybylski and colleagues'.