Christina:

I am sitting in my family’s home office / project room with the door closed trying to write this script for you while my daughter wails on the top floor that her daddy is the worst and hardest teacher in the world. How are you doing?

My name is Christina Crook and I am the author of the Joy of Missing Out. I want to welcome you to the JOMOcast, a brand new podcast for founders and creators seeking joy in a digital age.

JOMO is the joy of missing out on the right things, life-taking things like toxic hustle, comparison, disconnection, and digital drain in order to make space for life-giving commitments that bring us peace, love, meaning, and joy. 

How ARE you doing? I’ve asked you this question on social media, in emails, conversations and texts over the past week and you’ve told me:

“My days will most likely not look very different (at home with kids). That’s OK.”

“I am feeling more intense FOMO than ever in ‘how to live in isolation well’ land. The home-schooling tips, and push up contests.  I can’t even think straight.”

“I'm worried that I'm not doing enough...but also worried about taking it too far and feeling foolish on the other side.”

“I hope I’m sharing the right amount of info with my children...not enough to scare them but enough to ease the anxiety and explain why we're doing what we're doing.”

So much uncertainty- and in that, humanity. Let’s talk about that humanity. 

I’ve been reflecting on how FOMO won the last decade. It won the 2010s. A ten-year inferno of attention-grabbing, depression-breeding, lizard-brain-abusing online platforms and ads- so many ads, in every corner of our lives, telling us:

You are not enough. 

You don’t have enough. 

You are not enough.

Fear of missing out won the day. 

At the start of this year, 2020, in another reality, I went to the museum across the street from my office to experience Age of You, an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, here in Toronto, which showed how digital capitalism and the attention economy of clicks, minutes and hours of our lives has forced the self to become more extreme. 

We see the signs of the extreme all around us. Extreme fear of what’s happening to our extracted data.  Extreme digital personas in service of online follower growth. Now, extreme existential panic as we face a global pandemic. 

The big question the curators of the exhibition were tackling was this: “The breakdown of consensus-based reality is perhaps one of the most dangerous threats there has ever been to our shared human experience. Is there any turning back?”

Here we stand in the midst of the largest collective global experience of our lifetime. This is the shared human experience. Doctors and journalists and governments are working around the clock to ensure we have the most accurate and reliable information, so we can make the best possible choices for our local, national, and global communities.

Overnight we’ve gone from a “You” to an “Us.” Have you noticed that? Can you feel it? Can you hear it?

The artists at the exhibition I went to asked: Is there any turning back? We know now, that there is.

By coming closer to local, embodied experiences, the ways that neighbours are looking out for each other in unprecedented ways today; nurturing relationships with those we can know and touch and see, the ways that we’re all beginning to zoom and facetime to connect with family and friends in ways we always meant to but never quite did; looking out for our neighbour across the street; hanging out of balconies to sing like they are in Italy; counting the birds returning to Wuhan; looking up at night counting more and more and more stars over Toronto each night, like I am. 

As for me, I’ve been thinking a lot about my neighbourhood and the fixtures of it, the people I’ll need to lean into and look out for as we prepare for weeks and maybe months and maybe many months of social distancing. I’m not thinking about missed amenities or the increased inconveniences that’ll inevitably set in. I’m actually thinking about my neighbour Henderson. And Heather. And Reta.

How will we show up for one another? How will we right now?

I’m thinking about the humans, living rooms and sidewalks right in front of me: the beating, breathing, scriptless world. Maybe you are too.

And that makes me think about the Internet.

A lot of us are turning to social media. To retreat. To connect. To escape. We are turning there for a lot of reasons. This has me wondering: what is the impact of all our interstitial - all our in-between - time being captured by the attention economy? Have our interpersonal skills essential for forging and sustaining relationships, the abilities we need now during this pandemic, been nurtured or hampered by the time spent growing our ‘online presence’? At what cost have we wasted time on the Internet?

I share technology philosopher Albert Borgmann’s belief that we tend not to hold technological advancement up to much scrutiny because we’re assumed to be the best judges of what we need for ourselves to be happy.

In the abstract, it sounds like a wonderful idea, but society is a common and collective enterprise, right? Can we ever truly examine (or create) a better society when we’re unable to observe it as more than the sum of a hundred million individual likes and dislikes, which may be rational or not at all?

Most of us alive today have probably never felt that level of collective outcome more than we do RIGHT NOW. 

For the last 10 years, what I have observed from my perspective as a mother, a neighbour, and a digital well-being expert, has been a way of life so at odds with our needs that we had begun to belittle human vulnerabilities. We’ve spent a decade trying to life-hack our way out of our imperfections in order to keep pace with our machines. In the process, we’ve begun to dehumanize ourselves and others by our refusal to admit the intrinsic inefficiency and interdependency of the human experience.

Like the ways Henderson and Reta and I and the new neighbor I met last week around the corner are going to lean into one other. That intrinsically inefficient and interdependent experience of being a neighbor and a friend.

SUDDENLY, WE NEED TO TRUST and RELY ONE ANOTHER.  

“We need people in our lives with whom we can be as open as possible,” wrote Thomas Moore.  

Trust is built and maintained by many small actions over time. It’s the most precious thing in this world. 

“To have real conversations with people may seem like such a simple, obvious suggestion,” continues Thomas Moore, “but it involves courage and risk.”

And friends, we are going to have to risk and trust a lot over the coming months. It’s just begun. We are going to have to show up for ourselves and our families and our communities and it’s going to be risky. We are going to need to look neighbours across the street, across the porch, across the balcony in eyes and say: It’s okay. I’ve got you. 

We are going to have to decide what we’re willing to miss out on to build a future worth wanting.

My deepest hope is that we won’t return to normal after the waves and aftershocks of Covid-19 have passed through. These are extraordinary times. We are being compelled to learn new habits of living and create new routines. Right now I encourage you to schedule time to take stock and become aware of what is populating your life and attention right now. What are you reading, who are you listening to, how are you moving? What frivolous thing is bringing you joy? What deeper more serious thing is bringing you joy? Are you able to make joy for someone else? What voices and habits are depleting your joy? Are they worth it? Is this the time to say goodbye to them once and for all? 

We can support our mental and emotional well-being right now by limiting ourselves to 2 News sources for just 50 minutes a day maximum. We need space to digest, to grieve, to journal and pray, to make art, to call a loved one, to process the images and information we’re receiving each day. If you can't take the over ambition of some, the severity of others, the chatter of pundits, or another goddamn inspirational Instagram live, follow your gut: turn it off. Lie on your bed and stare at the ceiling. There will never be a more clarifying moment. What is essential, what is non-essential. I encourage you to listen and act now, let the non-essential fall away. You have permission. You have permission. You have permission.

I recently discovered a quote from Anna Kamienska, from her book Astonishments–what a beautiful title–where she writes: 

“Joy- it's not just a gift. In a sense it's also a duty, a task to fulfill. Courage.”

Three things have been empowering me to choose courage right now:

First is understanding the Kubler-Ross Stages of Grief cycle and where me and the people in my space are on it- and understanding that, contrary to the simpler view of about 50 years ago, these stages aren’t a straight line. We drop into the cycle at different points, and move forward and backward depending on our personalities. It’s been a great help in finding the language and framework to understand where people are at.

The second, is understanding that the most important thing we can offer one another right now is EMOTIONAL SUPPORT. We don’t need to fix the problem, we don’t need to fix their feelings- and we CAN’T do either of those things. We just need to be present. We need to be human -- TOGETHER.

The third is CREATIVITY. We have the opportunity to make the absolute best out of THIS PRESENT MOMENT. Presence is our only refuge from the things we can’t control or predict. 

I hung my handmade fabric birthday party banners all over our back patio and upstairs porch so we - and our neighbours - can see these colourful triangles move with the breeze during these grey days of late winter.

I’ve started letting our kids find easy bake recipes on YouTube and letting them have at it. JOY.

Walks in the backwoods are saving me, and I hope we can keep that up for as long as possible. 

Another vital element of my global strategy has been following joyful cues. If I’m really honest, my tolerance for anything that doesn’t spark joy right now is astoundingly low. If something irks me on Twitter, I unfollow. If a stack of books on my nightstand stresses me out, I remove it immediately and place only the one that brings me most joy. In this case it’s Miriam Taoews, A Complicated Kindness.

This strategy is good. It’s working for me. There is NO ROOM for toxicity. None of us has the space for it right now. 

Also, if I’m feeling a wave of panic, I tell my partner, Michael, and take the quiet space in private that I need. This isn’t easy with three kids at home, but we’re all trying to give each other as much room as we can to get through this right now. 

In the midst of loss. 

In the midst of missing out on MANY THINGS, we are finding joy in things we are not usually able to do. 

Dennis Miloseski recently tweeted, “all will pass in due time, and I’m hopeful that the silver lining is a mental shift in how we used tech to better ourselves rather than just use it for mindless consumption.”

Shannon Valor, Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh Futures Institute, wrote to me this week and said: 

“These are challenging times for everyone but I think there are new and even more urgent questions to be asked now about digital well-being, given that most of us will need to depend almost exclusively on digital channels for social support for the foreseeable future.”

Have you noticed that? The “Us” language? The WEs? The world is finally a WE. We’ve left the FOMO-fuelled Age of You behind. 

Welcome to the Age of Us. 

..and, welcome to the second season of the JOMO(cast). New episodes will launch on April 15 with some of the most important voices in well-being and technology in the world.

I’d also like to announce 100 days of JOMO, our response to the global pandemic.

Right now, during this global pandemic, we are all missing out. We are missing out on things we need and on things we don’t need. I want to know how you're finding joy in the midst of it. I also want to know, what are the things you NEED to miss out on right now? While we are all dealing with the world being turned upside down, what is one thing that's brought you joy that you wouldn't normally have done? How is the pandemic helping you discover new or old joys? How is it sustaining you?

Share your story to hello@experiencejomo.com and we will post it on all of our social channels and record it here for posterity. 

1, 2, 3... GO. 

Remember, one of the values of the JOMO community is being people who embrace our humanity; who would rather feel pain than feel nothing.

We don’t use the Internet to hide. 

With these stories, we are not looking for perfection. 

We are not looking for genius, we’re not looking for make-up.. 

We want to know the first thing that comes to mind. 

Wherever you are. 

Hit us. 

Joy. 

Visit experiencejomo.com, follow @experiencejomo or check out the show notes to learn more and share your story. 

Wherever you are, may you find joy missing out on the right things. I’m your host, Christina Crook. Thank you for listening.