What if FOMO isn't a problem to solve?
It started with a Monday morning feeling. Opening Slack, seeing what my colleagues are working on, and immediately wanting to know more. A different project angle. A course discussion I missed. A reading someone recommended in passing. Classic FOMO – except I was studying it at the same time.
FOMO shows up everywhere in content strategy. It's one of the core mechanics behind how feeds are structured, how newsletters build loyal readers, how brands time their campaigns. I knew this theoretically. But experiencing it as a student – in real time, about my own learning – gave me a completely different relationship to the concept.
In Nir Eyal's Hooked FOMO is described as a variable reward: the unpredictability of what you might find is precisely what makes you keep checking. You can understand FOMO as a content mechanic and still feel it about your colleagues project choice. That's actually useful information. What I noticed is that FOMO, when you pay attention to it, tells you something accurate. That Monday morning feeling wasn't noise – it was pointing at something I genuinely valued: the conversations, the range of approaches, the fact that everyone in the cohort was thinking about content problems from a completely different angle. FOMO was tracking something real.
That reframe changed how I think about it professionally too. When an audience feels FOMO around a platform or a newsletter, it's usually because something genuinely interesting is happening there. The question worth asking isn't just 'how do we trigger this feeling' but 'what are we actually offering that makes people not want to miss it.' Those are very different starting points for a content strategy.
For me this year, the answer was the people. The cohort, the guest speakers, the moments in class when a conversation went somewhere none of us had planned. That's what I didn't want to miss – and that's what kept me engaged even during the weeks when the work itself was slow or stuck. I'm still working out what this means for my own practice. But I think it starts with being honest about what you're actually offering – not manufacturing urgency, but building something people have a real reason to come back to.
Further reading
Nir Eyal — Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
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