Economists have long understood opportunity cost: the value of the next-best thing you gave up when you made a choice. FOMO-nomics, the dominant economic model of the hyperconnected age, takes this to its logical extreme. If you are not doing everything at once, you are missing everything.
Under FOMO-nomics, every moment not spent at a concert, an art opening or a restaurant with a waitlist is lost value. Happiness is assumed to rise in direct proportion to the number of experiences accumulated, ideally photographed.
The model has some problems. It ignores the law of diminishing marginal utility, under which each additional experience is worth less than the one before. The fifth concert of the week does not bring the joy of the first. By the eighth you are mostly in the bathroom line.
It also fails to price the non-monetary costs: burnout, stress and neglected friends, who are at home and would have liked to see you.
The rational move, economically speaking, is to miss out on some things on purpose. Several economists have endorsed this position. None of them could attend the conference where it was presented.
