Can You Ever Outgrow FOMO?

Laurie Bartley, Styled By Katie Lanphear

By Justine Harman

For a long time—perhaps since I first heard of the acronym that has all but defined my generation—I claimed that I was impervious to the affliction. Yes, I was utterly convinced that FOMO (or, the fear of missing out), was something that I could will away. Here’s how: In the event that I wasn’t at an party attended to by all of my friends, or in the rare instance that I’d successfully removed myself from the bacchanalia that typically ensued when we’d convene (dinner, followed by tequila shots, followed by a late night spent zombie-ing around Southside), I’d repeat a simple mantra: It would be more fun if I were there. And, for a while, that worked beautifully because I knew that once the sun came up and the noonish texts demanding brunch, bloodies, or a good sweat to combat the Sunday Scaries started flooding in, I’d be back in the mix. The threat of being excommunicated or deemed extraneous would lift and life, as I knew it, would resume.

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Now, here is where the story bifurcates. If you’d like, I can take you back to the episode from my childhood that cemented the idea that friends, unlike family, are temporary (and that you are extremely lucky if day after day, year after year, the same people you like decide to like you back). If that’s the story you want to hear about and, truly, it’s a hard one for me to tell, you can skip ahead to page two. If, instead, you’d rather hear about the moment when I was no longer able to suppress my FOMO, let’s soldier on together.

As it has been painstakingly documented on ELLE.com, I recently, along with my husband and our dog—whom we love dearly, thank you very much—closed an eight-year-long chapter in New York and made our way south to Philadelphia. It’s been 127 days since the day I went to work and never returned to the apartment where I first cohabited with a boyfriend, found out that my dad had terminal leukemia, received the news that I’d gotten a job at ELLE, and returned home engaged after a surreal hiking trip in Woodstock, New York.

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In addition to those milestones, our 650-square-foot apartment on Perry Street, which we lovingly called “The Hob” (a misappropriated The Hunger Games reference), was also headquarters to my close-knit circle of gal pals. Oh, the fun we would have, three or four of us piled up on an L-shaped couch whose cushions had been flipped so many times that soy sauce spills and cigarette burns were no longer met with concern. Here, after pitchers full of white wine on ice, my friends and I conceptualized a networking club aimed at “bringing down the firewall” between the people with whom we’d cultivated e-mail-only relationships at work. My apartment on was also the de facto site for countless pregames, brainstorms, and screenings of beloved films (from Wet Hot American Summer, to Country Strong, to Almost Famous, to The Last Waltz). In the four years that I lived there, I never once experienced real FOMO because I never really missed out on anything. As my beloved Penny Lane would say, it was “all happening” right under my nose.

After electing to leave behind a life of constant get togethers, impromptu sleepovers, and “wanna hang outs?” Justine Harman realized that she’s FOMO positive.

Laurie Bartley, Styled By Katie Lanphear

So, here’s the embarrassing anecdote I promised: In the sixth grade, I had something truly damaging happen to me. My best friend, a willful and tall athletic type, decided that she no longer liked me. Instead of coming out and telling me this, however, she sent me an anonymous letter in the mail. In lieu of a return address she had written, inexplicably, “Rumpelstiltskin in a haystack” on the upper left hand of the envelope. To this day, the childishness of that word choice still haunts me. Worse yet, she had underestimated the expediency of the United States Postal Service and happened to be enjoying a cup of Swiss Miss with me and my mom in our kitchen when the mail arrived. She vehemently denied it was from her, of course, and I said that I believed her. (My mom says that she resisted every urge to toss that prepubescent mean girl through the window so as not to embarrass me.) I still remember how I felt when we were sledding together later that afternoon: confused, shaken, and totally self-conscious. When she later confessed that itwas her (shocker), I had already prepared myself for impact. On the hill behind my house that day, I swore up and down that I would never leave myself open to that level of friend-inflicted pain.

Now, sure, it’s a promise that I have broken a few times over the years. For example, the time I met my best friend Caitlin in college and basically re-enacted that scene from Step Brothers. Or, when, years after friendmaking season came to a close, I found myself sharing a bottle of wine in bed with my high school best friend’s best friend from Berkeley. Reading what I have just written, a lot of these connections sound rather romantic. And though I assure you that our relationships are platonic, anyone with a ride-or-die crew of girlfriends knows how rawly, line-blurringly, TMI these friendships can get. Even more so in New York City, where anything is possible and your universe, at its very widest, is only 2.3 miles across.

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When I packed up my things for Philadelphia, I repeated my FOMO-proof mantra over and over again: It would be more fun if I were there. It would be more fun if I were there. It would be more fun if I were there. And for a while I convinced myself that it would. But like with all things, the fresh wound of my departure—which was readily tended to with “Can you come up for…” invitations and “Babe, I miiiiissss you” sutures—slowly healed. My friends continued to post up at The Other Room, tag along on each other’s dates, and spend hours bullshitting on each others’ couches. And though I know they haven’t stopped loving me, I also know that they’re not losing any sleep because my place is no longer home base, either. I don’t blame them, of course. Perhaps a large part of my interest in hosting the hangouts in the first place was that they were on my terms: If my friends kept asking to come over, I knew for certain that they still wanted to be friends. Now, if I want to see them, I have to make myself available. I have to implore people to commit to dinner plans as I no longer have the luxury of being spontaneous. In many ways, moving to Philadelphia has forced me to be vulnerable—and to bring down the first firewall I erected that snowy day in the sixth grade.

And though sometimes I still experience FOMO, I finally realized that my mantra is no longer such a good one. First off, it’s narcissistic to assume that anything would be more fun if I were there. Second, it’s unfair to the new life my husband and I are trying to build. I never noticed before, but “It would be more fun if I were there” sounds an awful lot like “It would be a lot more fun if I were there.” So here’s my new motto. Repeat after me: “It would be more fun if I were here. Here I am. I am here. Here’s okay. I’m okay.”

Now say it again.

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