Fear of Missing Out

The Cost of Missed Opportunity. Is there an expression for that?

A good theory carries both blessings and curses.

The blessings are many. A good theory allows you to understand that which is otherwise mysterious. Understanding, in turn, is both intrinsically rewarding and useful. If you have a good theory about how inheritance works, you can breed pigeons with the traits you want them to have, as Charles Darwin did. Good theories put rockets in orbit, kill parasites by the trillions, and suppress hyperinflation. Civilization as we know it is built on good theories from across the sciences.

The curses depend on your disposition. If you revel in the mysterious, then theories can spoil all the fun. If you have a banger theory about where the magician stashes his rabbit, you will lose your wonder when Thumper McBigEars pops out of her hat.

Another curse of a good theory is that—again depending on your disposition—you can find it irritating when others offer an explanation that is just wrong. People versed in the theory of evolution by natural selection find it irritating to watch a nature documentary in which the narrator intones that the penguins huddle for warmth for the good of the group rather than the good of the individual penguins who eventually get too hot in the scrum.

Yet a third curse is that when you have a good theory, other people get irritated when you keep using it. There he goes again, explaining everything with evolution by natural selection, accompanied by an eye roll. Can you believe it?!

Blessings and curses.

Opportunity Costs

As Josh has occasionally noted in his posts, I am quite taken with the concept of opportunity cost. Here I go again, explaining another thing with opportunity cost. Can you believe it?

To an economist, the opportunity cost is the gain that you give up from one alternative when you’ve chosen another. Usually, it’s more specifically defined as the value of the alternative that was next best after you’ve made your choice.

I remember the first time I learned the concept opportunity cost. I was in a high school social studies class. The teacher’s example was that if you had bought a bag of Doritos with your quarter—ah, those were the days—then you couldn’t buy a Giant Size Twix bar with that quarter. So the Twix was the opportunity cost of the Doritos. To a 14-year-old, the idea that if you bought one thing with your quarter you couldn’t buy a different thing seemed obvious and, therefore, dull.

Later, when I was a post-doc at the University of Arizona, living with economists, I got into a conversation in which one of my learned colleagues casually dropped the sentence that all costs are opportunity costs. This little nugget led to a discussion of scarcity, tradeoffs, and much else, and I recall being deeply impressed with the notion, curious about how it applied in the context of evolutionary game theory, and regretful at my prior scoffing at the idea when I was a wee lad. But, then again, I was but a wee lad. What did I know?

Around 2006 or so, a few years down from my time at Arizona, I was in the kitchen thinking about the sense of effort. I was wondering why it felt unpleasant, rather than pleasant, to continue to work on tasks that were to one’s long-term benefit, such as practicing an instrument, honing one’s dulcet prose, or simply doing one’s job. I was at the time not coincidentally avoiding the effort of carefully julienning the carrots.

It was a bit hazy at first, but that was the moment that led me to start sniffing around the idea that the answer might have to do with opportunity cost and led me to what I still see as among my best ideas as an academic.

Yes, opportunity cost is hammer seeking a nail.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of nails out there.

To wit…

The Fear of Missing Out

I recently wrote about Cute Crushing. That essay was part of an ongoing mission I have to explain all the feelings that people feel. I’ve written about some of the big ones that are just lying out in the open, such as contempt, curiosity, and contentedness, showing an odd affinity for the letter c, but I’ve also been trying to peer at some of the little feelings stuck in the couch cushions, such as awe, ticklishness, and, now, the fear of missing out.

A good theory can be a curse.

When someone experiences the fear of missing out—I refuse to use the abbreviation the kids do these days—the experience is negative. Why is that?

Well, feelings are measuring something and motivating something in the service of solving some adaptive problem. Can this framework make short work of the fear of missing out?

Why do humans have this feeling? What’s the evolved function?

It’s to do with… surprise! Opportunity costs. The clue is in the fact that the fear of missing out has to do with missing an opportunity.

Opportunity costs arise whenever there is scarcity and, therefore, decisions to make about tradeoffs. Because you can only use a dollar, your time, your hands, or certain bits of your brain for one thing at a time, when you make a decision you can’t use it for something else. In the context of the sense of effort, if you’re planning your trip to Universal Studios, you can’t be doing your math homework, riding your bike, or parenting your child. The opportunity cost of carrying a barbell around is the benefit of carrying two dumbbells around. It all starts with scarcity.

In the case of the fear of missing out, the scarcity is that at any given moment, because of the nature of reality and the universe, you must occupy only one tiny part of the space-time continuum: You can't be everywhere at once. This leads to the need for evolved computational systems to maximize fitness benefits from how and where you choose to spend your time. When you're at home watching Netflix, you're not at that party where your friends are networking, flirting, and having experiences that might advance their social or romantic prospects. When you're grinding away at work, you're missing the family dinner.

Humans track these costs: "If I stay here, what am I not getting over there?"

And when that cost is sufficiently high, we get our butts off the couch.

The feeling of missing out measures the opportunity cost forgone by not doing the other thing and it motivates doing the other thing so we make the best (fitness) use of our time. The greater the benefit one is not getting compared to the benefit one would get if one doesn’t go, the greater one’s negative experience of missing it. That’s the measurement. Not unlike effort.

It just doesn’t seem all that complicated.

So that’s dull.

Good theories make explanations easy.

Scholarship

When I began writing this essay, I assumed that this idea was well entrenched in the literature, probably for ages now.

Well.

A search for the fear of missing out doesn’t yield nothing, but it doesn’t yield much. A meta-analysis in 2021 found 36 papers that fit the authors’ investigation into the fear of missing out.¹

Early work defined the fear of missing out as “a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent… characterized by the desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing.”

These authors took the fear in the fear of missing out seriously: it’s apprehension. Note that they limited the phenomenon to the social world—what others are doing—and they described the motivation in social terms: staying connected. They found “that those high in fear of missing out were more likely to give into the temptation of composing and checking text messages and emails while operating motor vehicles” (p 1847).

After this early work, the bulk of the research in psychology proceeded as it usually does (he said with more than a hint of disdain). Psychologists built a scale to measure people’s individual differences in propensity to experience the fear of missing out and related that measurement to other measures of the sorts of things psychologists talk about: wellbeing, academic performance, drinking alcohol, sleep problems, and clinical issues such as depression.

Later, scholars defined it as a motive: “Fear of Missing Out can be defined as the constant desire to follow the exciting and glorious lives of others through the internet and a state of constant anxiety about it” (my italics).

So that’s the state of the art in psychology. Maybe a fear, maybe a desire, maybe an individual difference variable, definitely not a measure of opportunity cost.

And then, in my search of the literature, came the economic rainbow after the psychological storm.

An excellent treatment—and by that I mean one that accords with my perspective—emerged just this year.

Lejarraga and Sákovics (2025) built a model to formalize their ideas.

\(W(A;A) := V(A) - r_a V(B) \quad \text{and} \quad W(B;A) := V(B) - r_d V(A) \)

The model is about a person making a decision between two options, called A and B. The notation V() is the psychological value of the option, so V(A) means the value or utility that the decision maker gets from choosing option A. You can think of this as the intrinsic or standalone utility. If I like watching Netflix, I get some value from it: V(watching Netflix).

Their idea is that the value or joy you get from something you choose depends on what the other options are. That is, when you're evaluating a choice in the presence of an alternative, that value gets modified: You subtract a portion of the forgone option's standalone utility to account for the loss of not picking it. The term W(X;Y) is again a utility term, but it includes this idea that how much joy I get from a choice depends on the alternative. So, holding aside that little r_a for the moment, W(X;Y) means “the utility I get from X when Y is the default option.”

So that first equation means that the utility I get from choosing A when A is the default option is the amount of joy I get from A generally minus the joy I would have gotten from choosing B, the alternative. Mathematically, if A is your default (like staying home) and B is the alternative (a concert), the modified utility of sticking with A becomes V(A) minus V(B).

Let’s get back to that little r_a. It’s a scaling factor between 0 and 1 that represents how much of the alternative's value you "feel" as a loss when you pass it up. If your r_a is big, close to 1, then you really feel the pull of the alternative. A high r_a means you are the adventurous sort—that’s what the little a stands for—so you dislike missing out on the alternative. The authors use a similar term, r_d, which is akin to an endowment effect: it’s the extra pain you suffer when you choose the alternative instead of the default.

As the authors put it, r_a captures “a stylized idea of the ‘fear of missing out’ or FoMO: the DM [decision maker] suffers a loss when she misses out on an opportunity she could have had” (p. 3).

To put it more concretely, you might like staying home. That gives you, say, 7 on the Life Enjoyment Scale, or whatever. You get a text telling you that some friends are going to a concert and you’re invited. You imagine you’d get 8 joy at the concert. Now your joy of staying home is diminished a little bit, so it’s 7 minus (8 times your particular fear of missing out coefficient, r_a). If you don’t fear missing out at all, and your r_a is zero, staying home is just as joyful as it was. If you fear missing out a lot, and your r_a is one, then staying home now really sucks and you’ll probably go to the concert.

This formal economic model dovetails nicely with my own view and is appealing because it formalizes it. It’s also similar to my view, and different from the psychological account, in that it’s a general model of decisions as opposed to those limited to the social world. From my point of view, the feeling should account for two activities one might do alone: if I go hiking in the woods by myself, I can’t spend the day writing, also by myself. Sure, the social element makes certain activities more valuable, but that’s not the heart of the feeling.

And the model I think captures how we experience this feeling. As the value of the alternative rises and our disposition to choose the non-default option increases, we are increasingly motivated to choose the alternative.

Conclusion

Some feelings are hard. Tickishness and awe are puzzling.

This one doesn’t seem all that tricky to me. Animals have to make decisions and we should expect them to take alternatives into account when making their choices. The motivational system—how the choices feel—is there to direct choice to the better option.

The fear of missing out is really the felt cost of an option that one can choose, motivating us to try to take advantage of the opportunity, if it is possible to do so.

Kinda dull, really.

But that’s the price you pay for a good theory.

1. To take just one comparison, a meta-analysis that same year of interventions in positive psychology found almost an order of magnitude more studies to include, 347.