Day 12 of NaBloMoPo finds me delving into my saves on Facebook for inspiration and coming up with this Youtube interview with the wonderful Claudia Winkleman. I love Claudia, she just makes me smile and I relate to a lot of her attitudes apart from the black eye liner and tippex mouth.
Anyway the thing that really jumped out at me was her reference to JOMO (around 6.4 on the clip). Not an acronym I had encountered before but definitely one I can relate to. It stands for Joy of Missing Out and is the opposite of the other urban acronym FOMO – Fear of Missing Out. I am sure we have all been through the latter including myself; worrying about not being invited to a party or some other event. I have spent far too many hours on Twitter for fear of missing out on something, I’m not even sure what, but whatever it is I have managed quite well in recent months, since I stopped bothering much with Twitter, without it
But JOMO is really me these days. Like Claudia I have enjoyed getting older and yes I know I might not be saying that in 10 or 20 years time but as I face my 50th birthday early next year I feel more content with the world than ever. I am almost comfortable with who I am, my confidence has grown, I don’t care as much as I used to what people think about me or if my appearance is fashionable, or even some days acceptable! My children are off living their lives, I am well paid, I have my own home, and currently good health – why would I want to go back to teenage angst, or struggling to bring up children on my own in my 20s and 30s. No, now I am in my 40s I am content and I have got to that point where I really don’t care if I miss out on something, if I can have a quiet evening in, watch some rubbish on the television or read a book that, these days, is a real luxury.
Interestingly if you read the definition I have linked to for JOMO it specifically refers to social media and if I am honest in comparison to how much time I have spent on social media in the past the amount of time I spend now is negligible. I am even bad at reading blogs which is awful as I expect people to read mine, so apologies for that; I do keep trying to be better. But I do feel, certainly in my life and the people around me, that the enthusiasm for social media is waning. My sons hardly go on social media at all and I know that many people I used to follow on Twitter or Facebook are posting less and less so I wonder if our love affair with social media is cooling off. I was an early adopter of Twitter and used to love the instantaneous conversations you could have but now it is clogged up with advertising, people getting on their band-wagon or people RT-ing things; the conversation has all but disappeared. Now I find the only conversations I have on social media are through Facebook and those are few and far between, or through the comments on a blog. For me what I want is somewhere you can interact with people without having to struggle through all the other stuff, just as I would prefer to meet friends somewhere quiet rather than in the middle of a noisy bar or club. Maybe its me getting older or maybe its just that with such a busy and demand job the times of quiet and peace have become all the more important to me.
So I am, like Claudia, totally JOMO.
Note: I found the original interview on The Pool which is a great website aimed at women who do not have time to browse the internet. I tends to be my lunchtime reading these days as opposed to twitter or facebook.
