Earlier phases of life seem wrought with the painful, unshakable feeling of FOMO—Fear Of Missing Out. FOMO colored the conventional middle and high school experience; it’s the ultimate determinant of status. Would you be invited to the BIIIIIIG hangout at the mall? Will you have to sit at home with access to home-baked snacks, The Suite Life of Zach and Cody, and napping receptacles? How awful! You could have been drinking an over-priced soda, forced to engage in dull small talk, while walking in circles at the mall! So, maybe all those days of FOMO weren’t worth the hype. Were the high school struggles any more worthwhile? The advent of Snapchat stories served to exacerbate the issue: grainy videos of your ‘friends’ engaging in some, likely low-grade illegal, activity without you is a sure sucker punch to the gut. The nagging feeling though, can be diminished by knowledge that you skirted another risk of citation. So, what was my earlier life missing? JOMO (and perhaps the ability to crack nuts with my bare claws).
What, you may ask, exactly is JOMO? The Joy Of Missing Out! Equipped with this mind set, I can now freely and blissfully engage in my social hermit behavior. Missed that FB party invite (that you probably would have said going to and not gone to anyways)? Ran into your friends eating without you at the Ratty? Didn’t cop the invite to the latest iteration of ‘My Ridiculously Extravagant 21st Birthday in a Remote Destination?’ Who fucking cares!!!! Now as a hermit crab, I truly couldn’t care less.
I have been able to so fully embrace social isolation that I have surpassed human forms of hermitude and actually evolved into a hermit crab! Darwin’s claims that evolution can’t happen in one lifetime be damned! In the past three months since hearing JOMO for the first time, I have slowly backed myself further and further into a coiled shell while my arms have gradually morphed into red claws (believe me it’s been hard to type this!). This new body form is the ultimate bearer of hermitude: even if I am forced to interact with others and can’t be truly alone at home, I can easily recreate being alone but fully crawling into my shell. It’s nice and cozy in there; I have a couple oil diffusers, a fully functional Keurig, and the fluffiest of blankets. In the off chances I do emerge from either my home or the depths of my shell, I can loosely paraphrase the lyrical geniuses the Killers and let everyone know that “I’m coming out of my shell, and I’ve been doing just fine.”
Image via and Suzanne Antoniou