Season 3 Finale: How FOMO Was Created

Fifteen years ago, while host Patrick McGinnis was a student at Harvard Business School, he wrote a column for the student newspaper about his observation that the student body’s social schedules were driven by two forces: The Fear of Missing Out and the Fear of a Better Option — or FOMO and FOBO, for short. Then McGinnis graduated, started his career, and mostly forgot about it — until a reporter looking into FOMO’s origins tracked it back to him.In this excerpt from a conversation taped live onstage for HBS’s Skydeck podcast, McGinnis and Dan Morrell discuss the origins of FOMO and FOBO, how these forces work in our social and professional lives, and how we can manage them.

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