The lines between the real and unreal are blurring faster than we can keep up as AI deep fakes and VR technologies advance - transformations in the ways we live, work, and relate to one another. One of the guiding beliefs of JOMO, inspired by philosopher Jean Vanier, is “to be human means to remain connected to our humanness and to reality.” What is it about digital technology that poses a challenge to these connections? When they’re misaligned, we experience distress. When our values and time spent align, we experience peace. That's Why my work centres around values and aligning our tech use with those articulated values. Merriam-Webster defines joyas “ the emotion evoked by well-being, success, or good fortune or by the prospect of possessing what one desires.”These are the common factors preventing people from embracing JOMO - not knowing what they really want. This leads us back to the core question of JOMO: what brings you joy? Another way of asking this is, what supports your well-being and moves you meaningfully towards your goals? That’s the experience of joy.
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We need to relearn how to have a courageous conversation, to look people in the eyes, but we have to want it first. We use phones for avoidance all of the time. I am a big champion of avoiding avoidance. We’re fed up with trying to fit our complicated existence into curated grids of images. We dehumanize ourselves and others by our refusal to admit the intrinsic inefficiency and interdependency of the human experience.Ī growing number of us are no longer content to quantify our lives by what we do, what we have, or what others think of us. We’ve spent a decade trying to life-hack our way out of our imperfections in order to keep pace with our machines. What I see in the present state of my culture is a way of life so at odds with our needs that we’ve begun to belittle human vulnerabilities.
It's Predicated on the effectiveness of liberal democratic individualism, co-opted by consumerist impulses nurtured by billion-dollar ad spends. Everything has a trade-off.Īs a mother, neighbor, and digital well-being expert, I’m calling out the “tech inevitability” excuse for what it is: a lie. I love James Williams’ framing when he asks: “What do we pay when we pay attention?” In Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, he writes, “We pay with all of the lives we might have lived.” That’s the truth. Every Choice is a thousand renunciations. What are some common factors that prevent people from embracing JOMO, and how do you advise people to overcome them?Ī lot of people are afraid that if they embrace JOMO they’ll fall behind and miss opportunities. Those letters and experiences led to the writing of several essays that led to my publisher - a sustainability focussed press - reaching out to have me expand my thinking into what would become The Joy of Missing Out. So, I gave it up for 31 days and took up an older technology, the typewriter, and instead wrote a letter to the same friend every day, chronicling my experience. I wanted to figure out what kind of creative, mother, neighbor, and friend I would be without the demands of the web. By that time, I was a mother of two very young children. As email and then social media took hold, I was keyed into the shifts that were happening culturally and personally - particularly the shifts in habits, relationships, and social etiquette. I studied at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication before working for some of Canada’s leading media organizations, including the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and Rogers Digital Media. What was your original inspiration for the book? You published The Joy of Missing Out: Finding Balance in a Wired World in2015, before topics like smartphone addiction and digital well-being had really entered the public consciousness.