Do Less This Summer! Let's Embrace JOMO

It's time for the Joy of Missing Out

Before we get into the art of doing nothing I want to share something. Evie magazine (the Cosmo of the right) put out a call asking for smut-free book recs and made a list of their smut-free recs (mostly good books tbh). It is the number one story on their website right now.

Here is what they had to say about smut:

Let’s face it—walking through today’s fiction section can feel like navigating a moral minefield. The covers alone sometimes feel too provocative to even look at in public, but more often than not it’s what’s inside those seemingly innocent cute book jackets that have us squirming.

Let’s face it—walking through today’s fiction section can feel like navigating a moral minefield. The covers alone sometimes feel too provocative to even look at in public, but more often than not it’s what’s inside those seemingly innocent cute book jackets that have us squirming.

I just don’t love the judgement here! Their take on smut is just fascinating to be for a website promoting a dress that looks like this.

And I would LOVE to have a convo with Evie about tradwives. Let’s all recommend Everyone is Lying to You to them. It’s smut-lite and tradwife heavy.

And speaking of Evie and tradwives. I have to tell you that one of the minefields of wearing the Evie raw milkmaid dress in daily life is that peeing in it is a little like peeing in a wedding dress. It takes a lot of skill to gather it into your lap when you gotta go.

ok…now let’s talk about doing less. I am total shit at doing nothing. Being productive is kindof my thing, my brand, my reason for being. And I know that I need to slow down, especially since come July I will be running at 88 miles per hour for three weeks on book tour (dates here…get your tickets bc they are starting to sell out).

So I have to be really intentional about slowing down. It’s not fucking easy.

We live in a world obsessed with more. More experiences, more connections, more content, more everything. Social media feeds us a constant stream of what we're supposedly missing: the perfect brunch, the dream vacation, the networking event that could change everything. We've become so afraid of missing out that we've forgotten how to miss out on purpose.

Enter JOMO: the Joy of Missing Out.

This is not a new thing. JOMO articles have been popping up since FOMO became a thing around 2018ish. But it’s definitely something we should resurface and recycle because acronyms make things fun.

JOMO is the emotionally intelligent antidote to FOMO. This isn't about becoming a hermit or giving up on social connections. It's about making intentional choices about how we spend our time and energy and finding actually happiness or calm in those choices.

Instead of measuring our lives against carefully curated Instagram posts, we start asking: What actually brings me joy? What aligns with my values? What do I need right now?

Also the things that bring other people joy might not bring you joy. I see a lot of people sitting on porches and sipping coffee in the morning on Instagram. I don’t think that brings me joy. I actually like to drink coffee inside at my desk reading the news or playing Wordle. I also see people baking. Not for me.

My friend Kristen Vukovic taught me the Croatian idea of fjaka while we were teaching together on the island of Losinj a couple of months ago. It’s one of those foreign words that is fun to say and even more fun to explain and it is a lot about doing nothing. As Kristen has written:

As a local explained to me, fjaka is a sublime state in which a human aspires for nothing. Fjaka is something that can’t be learned; in Dalmatia, it’s considered a gift from God. And one must experience it to awaken its meaning. Various Dalmatians I spoke with over a dozen visits explained that fjaka is an elusive concept that is experienced in different ways.

The Croatian poet Jakša Fiamengo said that fjaka is a specific state of mind and body. “It is like a faint unconsciousness,” he wrote, “a state beyond the self or – if you will – deeply inside the self, a special kind of general immobility, drowsiness and numbness, a weariness and indifference towards all important and ancillary needs, a lethargic stupor and general passivity on the journey to overall nothingness. The sense of time becomes lost, and its very inertness and languor give the impression of a lightweight instant. More precisely: it’s half somewhere and half nowhere, always somehow in between.”

A cheese plate in Croatia that brought me a lot of joy.

I like this idea of intensely doing nothing, but I think I will be quite bad at it. Still I will give it a shot.

I’m trying to make a list of things that actually do bring me joy and the things I want to say no to. For the rest of June I am cutting way back on social obligations and work meetings. I have done all of the Under the Influence interviews for June and I hope to have all of July done by the end of the week.

I’m going to keep writing this substack, but maybe a little less for a couple of weeks just to get off a screen. I am also using the Brick for the first time on my phone which is going to be interesting. I’ll tell you how it goes.

This is how else I am cultivating JOMO and fjaka this summer.

Get your copies of Everyone in Lying to You today everyone! You get this substack for free for a year when you do.

This is a list of purchasing options, but it is also available at a lot of indie bookstores and you can get signed copies mailed to you here and here. Tour stops are here!