The Joy of Missing Out

There’s something powerful, and more than a little subversive about choosing what not to engage with.

When I originally wrote about JOMO — the joy of missing out — I wasn’t thinking about technology at first. I was thinking about attention. About the subtle anxiety that comes from feeling that you should be reading more, joining more conversations, responding faster, keeping up with every shift in the landscape.

AI has amplified that feeling.

AI can generate strategy drafts, research summaries, slide decks, idea lists, alternative angles, counter-arguments, rewrites and refinements in seconds. The stream of possible input has become endless. And if we’re not intentional, that stream fills every available gap in our day.

The opportunity is not speed. It’s selectivity.

And I'm finding that AI can act as a filter for signal.

You can ask it to scan ten reports and surface the two themes that genuinely matter to your role.

You can use it to compress a dense article into a one-page brief before deciding whether it deserves your deeper attention.

You can let it organize scattered notes into structure so your energy goes toward judgement and direction rather than formatting and rearranging.

In that sense, JOMO becomes a strategic practice.

You consciously decide that you don’t need to consume everything that is available. You don’t need to chase every trend or respond to every notification. Instead you design your information diet the way you might design your nutrition, intentionally, with an awareness of what fuels clarity and what creates mental clutter.

Used thoughtfully, AI supports that discipline. Used wisely, it helps you curate, prioritize and preserve long stretches of thinking time by reducing the friction of low-value tasks.

And that preservation matters because in an environment where output can be generated instantly, the scarce resource is calm attention. Leaders who thrive will be those who create space around their thinking, who allow themselves to go deeper on fewer things, and who treat their cognitive bandwidth as something worth protecting.

JOMO, in the age of AI, is less about stepping away from the world and more about shaping how it reaches you.

Reduce the noise.

Guard your attention.

Choose deliberately what earns your mind.