Have you ever felt squeezed? Did you feel like it last week maybe? You know, that feeling of having your brain always on, always working on something even when you are resting, as if you could never turn it off. You might wake up in the morning and already feel overwhelmed with the endless list of tasks you are supposed to do that day. Maybe you have to work, do the groceries, go to the gym, and then also find that little extra time to focus on your side project, because you promised you would have done that by the end of the day.  

If you have ever felt that way, or if you are feeling like that now, don’t worry – you are not alone. You are in good company as a matter of fact.  

This ceaseless rush to accomplish many different goals is so rooted in our routine that sometimes we cannot even recognize it is not natural. Even that it is not the only way to live our lives, if we don’t give into it. And yet, it seems to affect almost everybody out there. That is why FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), has been first described at the beginning of this millennium as a psychopathology affecting more and more people (“FOMO”, n.d.). That is why everybody seems to always be busy, and why sometimes we might feel uncomfortable when we don’t have a tight schedule ahead of us, even if it means planning every moment of our spare time too.  

But why do we feel like that? And why is it such a widespread feeling? Giving one simple and straightforward answer would be impossible, if not reductive and naïve.  However, we can still look for some fundamental reasons to explain our behaviour as human beings in the last decades or so. If we are trying to squeeze out every last drop from our time to do something, it is because we are convinced that doing something gives meaning to our time. And, besides that, showing others that we are, in fact, busy. And how satisfied we feel when we have proved it! That sense of “squeezeness”, let’s call it this way, of being exhausted because of filling our day with every possible task we could think of is… fulfilling. Or is it?  

Training our body and mind into thinking we always have to be busy, and that we can always find that extra time, makes us want to do even more every day. This mechanism is It is connected with productivity – with hyperproductivity in fact – but also with performing (Galibert, 2013; Han, 2015b).  

Indeed, doing and showing are interlaced. Sociologists and philosophers have been studying this phenomenon deeply, especially from the 1960s. Guy Debord (1967) talked about The Society of the Spectacle analysing what he saw was going on around him. People were becoming increasingly interested in their appearances, leading to a decline of the society, shifting the focus of their interests. Observing social relationships, he identified a switch: if people were at first concern with directly living social interactions (being present in time), after that they gradually declined into being satisfied with having these interactions, and later in just showcasing them. According to Debord, everything became just a mere representation of what was once experienced first-hand.possess something, rather to show you possess that something. Debord understood it as an evolution of the capitalist society and consumerism (Debord, 1967). 

Since then, things have become even more sketchy. Byung Chul-Han (2015a; 2017) went deeper down the rabbit hole, elaborating on our way of living as the product of hypercapitalism – put simply, a new step in the evolution of capitalism. To understand it in the context of “squeezeness”, it refers to becoming so good at being productive and exploiting means of production, that the next logical step seems be to exploit ourselves instead of the objects around us (Han, 2015a; 2015b).  

We somehow have become our own employers, but not of the kindest type. Outside stimuli push us to the brink of productivity at all times, to have maximum engagement in every activity, to always be on top of everything. And, of course, we have to do it all looking content with everything, as that is the image we want to show others. That is why we often feel the urge to share every detail of our routine through Instagram stories or update our journal on TikTok.  We have become so good at being our own employers that we actually could consider ourselves promoted to CEOs and Heads of Marketing of our own personal brand – ourselves. And, what seems to be the case with all influencers at some point, someone manage to turn that into a career in and of itself. 

What a demanding job that is, though! Every employer’s ideal employee never stops working, never complains, and always feels like they could have done more, produced more. The fact is, however, that in our inner economies   there are no trade unions to advocate for our right to rest. That is why we experience FOMO and “squeezeness”. That is why we are endlessly looking for activities that can eat every bit of our free time, to process it and transform it into a productive moment (Galibert, 2013; he especially focuses on the chronophagie, “time-eating essence” of our times, which is strictly linked to hypercapitalism). In effect, FOMO and “squeezeness” push us into using every spare second for the pursuit of endless productivity, often leaving us fearing boredom.  

And yet it is what we should be chasing, instead of discarding it as moments of not being productive. It is boredom that creativity tends to spark from, for instance (Galimberti, n.d.: Hunt, 2020). Meaning, yes, you can keep staring at that wall in front of you as long as you need. You are not missing out on anything. 

Luckily, there are new trends emerging that follow this philosophy. Gen Z, for one, seems to be more prone to feel JOMO than FOMO (Sima, 2024). If FOMO was the fear of missing out, JOMO subverts this emotion, because it is the joy of missing out. It also aims to focus on being a bit less productive and a bit more bored – without having to let others know you are bored, that is the whole purpose of it!  

So, maybe next time you try to squeeze everything into your schedule, you can think about this article. Let go of FOMO, let go of “squeezeness” and send yourself on vacation, where you can embrace boredom and the joy of having nothing to do.