There is a precise moment, December 31st, when many of us understand that the problem is not the cold, nor the traffic, nor the watered down prosecco. It’s the very idea of having to be there. As if New Year’s Eve were a mandatory episode of a series you’ve been following for years just because “by now I have to know how it ends”.
New Year’s Eve today is an athletic test. You have to organize, choose, respond to messages, fake enthusiasm. You need to have a plan, a group, a story ready to tell the next day. It’s a bit like when we were little when we were told “have fun” and, magically, it stopped being fun.
And while everything outside screams “celebrate!”, inside there is a much less scandalous thought than it seems: what if we stayed at home? Not out of sadness. Not for lack of alternatives. But because, simply, we have already given. We have run out of social tokens, like in an old 90s video game, the ones without the possibility of saving.
New Year’s JOMO
That feeling has a name that seems to come out of a PowerPoint presentation, but it is surprisingly real: JOMO, Joy of Missing Out. The pleasure of missing something. Not to participate. Of not being there while “everyone else” does things that, when you think about it, you don’t miss at all.
JOMO is not isolation. It’s more like when you stop watching a series that everyone they love and you feel inexplicably better. Or when you close a group chat and your body reacts before your head, as if someone had suddenly turned down the volume of the world.
This is how it works on New Year’s Eve. No outfits to think about, no place to reach as if it were Mordorno synchronized toasts, just coordinating to leave the house is a miracle. Just you, time slowing down and that strange feeling of not having to prove anything. Not even to yourselves.
New Year’s Eve is the holiday of maximum expectation. The start of the year “properly”, whatever that means. Balance sheets, good intentions, photos with glasses raised as if we were all very convinced. JOMO arrives in silence and says one simple thing: you can start the year even in your pajamas. Spoiler: January 1st is coming anyway. Nobody rings the doorbell to lecture you.
Staying at home, dimming the lights, choosing silence or a selected presence is not a social surrender. It’s clarity. It’s understanding that not every night has to be epic. Some just need to be honest. Like the ones where you watch a movie you’ve already seen and you already know how it ends, but that’s okay.
Science confirms
And no, it’s not just a feeling to be told as an embarrassed confession. Psychological research has also started to take it seriously. A recent study on the Joy of Missing Out showed that this attitude functions as the gentle antagonist of FoMO, that insistent little voice that tells you that, somewhere, without you, something incredible is happening. Kind of like when you don’t go to a party and find out the next day that it was boring. Only this time you already know.
The research, divided into two separate studies and conducted on large samples, shows how JOMO is associated with higher levels of psychological well-being, mindfulness and self-compassion, as well as a healthier and less compulsive relationship with social media. In particular, an interesting fact emerges: JOMO seems to act as a protective factor compared to FoMO, the fear of being excluded, often fueled by continuous confrontation and forced online presence.
According to researchers, the ability to consciously accept disconnection – and even enjoy it – promotes greater emotional stability. This is not isolation, but a form of internal regulation: choosing not to be there reduces social performance anxiety and strengthens the perception of control over one’s time and energy. In practice: less comparison, less fear of falling behind, more ability to stay where you are without thinking that there is always something better elsewhere.
New Year’s JOMO is about boundaries. Not of closure, but of choice. Not of rejection of others, but of respect for oneself. It’s saying “not tonight” without feeling like secondary characters in your own life. It is to stop experiencing every absence as if it were a fault.
We live in a society that always pushes outwards, towards noise, towards compulsory presence and for this very reason staying outside can become a way of returning to oneself. Without proclamations, without shouted good intentions, without the pressure of starting the year “in the right way”, as if there were an invisible jury.
Because the right way, in the end, is the one that doesn’t empty us. And if this means watching a film you’ve already seen, toasting when it happens and going to sleep without a countdown, that’s fine. On the contrary. Maybe it’s just this: a New Year without expectations. Which, all things considered, is the best gift.
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