The moment the weather turns warm, you can almost feel the pressure in the air: live now, try everything now, don't waste a single hour of sunshine. I know that feeling well. Every year, the bold plans I dream up in January become reality by May, and I turn the whole season into one nonstop stream of experiences.
And yet, while I'm rushing from one plan to the next — my calendar looking more like an overbooked logistics center than a life — a suffocating shadow keeps trailing behind me. Why is it that even while I'm seemingly making the most of summer, a suspicion still washes over me: I'm missing something important?
Presence is what goes missing when you overcommit
We tend to assume that the fear of missing out belongs only to quiet, isolated moments — that it only strikes the people sitting alone on the couch on a lonely afternoon, watching everyone else's adventures unfold.
But I feel the paradox of summer firsthand: the more experiences I try to pack into my weeks, the less I'm actually able to live through them.
When the family trips, the weekends with friends, the outdoor evenings and the beach days all pile up back to back, the internal alarm in my head refuses to go quiet. Somewhere in the middle of all that motion, the anxiety creeps in: "Am I definitely in the best possible place right now?"
FOMO — short for Fear of Missing Out — was coined in the early 2000s, but it became a fixture of everyday life once social media took over. We latched onto the term so quickly because it finally gave a name to that very modern pressure that endless options load onto our shoulders.
Every choice means missing out on something else
The screen tucked in our pocket constantly whispers that the world is a bottomless catalog of experiences. Whether we're in the middle of a breathtaking hike or cooling off at our favorite beach, one flick of the thumb is all it takes — and suddenly we're staring at the sunset over some far-off exotic coastline, or a charming little Mediterranean side street.
The real root of the problem isn't that our own plans lack value. It's that the digital world convinces us that every single choice costs us a thousand other possibilities. The options we ignore — or deliberately turn down — start feeding the phantom of missing out, when all we really need to do is sink into the joy that already surrounds us.
I'm not trying to impress anyone
For me, this inner tension has nothing to do with showing off. I'm not running myself ragged to dazzle anyone. I don't post my experiences regularly, and when I do, I only share them with my small circle of around 150 people on Instagram — and even there, I'm careful about what I choose. I don't want to make the people I love feel bad.
So the pressure doesn't come from the outside — it comes from deep within. I feel as though the overwhelming majority of vivid, alive experiences are squeezed into these few warm months, and if I don't seize every chance right now, I'll inevitably regret it when the cooler days arrive. That weight is exactly what makes carefree presence so hard: every time I turn the page on the calendar, another door of possibility quietly closes — at least for a while.
As the summer wears on, the frantic pace often gives way to a quieter but far more melancholy inner countdown. The heat may still be blazing, but the thought of the inevitable transition seeps almost imperceptibly into everyday life. It feels eerily like the classic Sunday-afternoon dread — when the final hours of the weekend are no longer about resting, but about worrying over tomorrow's to-do list. August, to me, is the Sunday afternoon of the year — even though I know full well that with all this counting down, I'm destroying the very freedom I worked so hard for all year long.
Recognizing this is already half the battle, and I'm trying, more and more consciously, to actually be where I am. But letting go takes constant practice. Whenever I catch my thoughts drifting toward the next stop or the passing of time, I try to arrive back in the moment.
I won't pretend I always manage it
Because the truth is, I love summer. With my whole heart, unapologetically. This is when I truly come alive, and if I could, I wouldn't spend a single minute indoors — and I don't, apart from the unavoidable hours I have to give to work in order to pay for all of it.
But maybe the goal isn't to suppress this feeling, or to force myself into some slow, meditative way of being that simply isn't me. So the real lesson, for me, isn't that I need to stop moving so fast. It's that I have to learn to live with the price of my own desires. Missing out on things isn't a mistake — it's the natural consequence of choosing.
Summer is short, life is chaotic, and I'm the kind of person who wants to wring every last drop of sunlight out of these few months. And if that means FOMO occasionally sweeps over me, or that I have to remind myself to take a deep breath in the middle of the logistical madness — so be it. Maybe I'm not doing it by the book, but at least I'm living it wholeheartedly, for real.
What exactly is FOMO?
FOMO stands for the "Fear of Missing Out." It's the anxious sense that something better or more important is happening somewhere else, and that your own choices are causing you to miss it.
Why can FOMO feel worse in summer?
Because so many vivid experiences seem to be squeezed into just a few warm months. The feeling that you have to seize every opportunity now — or regret it later — can make it hard to simply enjoy the moment you're already in.
Does FOMO only affect people who feel left out?
Not at all. As the article shows, you can be constantly on the move, packing your calendar with plans, and still feel the pressure. The more you try to fit in, the harder it can be to truly live through any of it.
How can you ease summer FOMO?
Rather than suppressing the feeling or forcing yourself into a slower lifestyle, it helps to accept that missing out is the natural cost of every choice — and to gently bring your attention back to the moment you're actually in.
