Who Invented FOMO? How the 9/11 Attack Gave Modern Anxiety Its Name

Who invented FOMO? It was coined by venture capitalist and writer Patrick J. McGinnis. At the time, he was a Harvard Business School student, and the term appeared in a satirical article in the Harvard Business School student newspaper, The Harbus, on 10 May 2004. It began as a joke between friends and became one of the most well-known phrases to define today's digital anxiety, and it stems from more than a party culture in-joke.

How Did 9/11 Shape the Idea Behind FOMO?

McGinnis has explained that the concept behind FOMO didn't start at Harvard at all. It started a few years earlier. He was living in New York and had taken his GMAT exam on 10 September 2001. The next morning, 9/11 happened. According to The Creative Coalition's interview with McGinnis, that experience left him with a clear, urgent feeling: "You've got to live for every moment, you never know what's going to happen."FOMO

That mindset followed him to Harvard Business School that fall, where he found himself in what he described as the most choice-rich environment he'd ever lived in, packed with job opportunities, parties, trips, and social commitments. Wanting to say yes to everything, he soon realised he was overwhelmed and anxious, and that he wasn't alone in feeling that way.

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What Was the Original 2004 Article About FOMO?

McGinnis wrote the piece titled "Social Theory at HBS: McGinnis' Two FOs," coining both FOMO, Fear of Missing Out, and a second term, FOBO, Fear of a Better Option. He wrote it in under an hour, right before graduation, after noticing the phrase had already been circulating informally among classmates around his ski house in 2003 and 2004, according to Harvard Business School's own retrospective, "FOMO No Mo".

How Did FOMO Go From a Student Joke to a Global Term?

 

 

 

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A post shared by Patrick McGinnis (@patrickjmcginnis)

The term spread through word of mouth as HBS graduates carried it into their new workplaces, and BusinessWeek even ran an article covering it. But the real accelerant was proximity to something much bigger. McGinnis lived just seven minutes from a Harvard undergraduate named Mark Zuckerberg, and as social media exploded, FOMO caught fire alongside it. The term eventually entered the dictionary, and McGinnis formally trademarked "FOMO" a decade later, in 2014.

Does Modern Research Actually Support FOMO as a Real Anxiety Trigger?

Yes. A 2024 Behavioural Sciences study of 451 university students found FOMO showed a significant positive correlation with online social anxiety, with irrational procrastination and media multitasking both acting as mediating factors. A larger 2025 study of over 3,100 college students, published in PsyCh Journal, used network analysis to show how FOMO, nomophobia, and social media addiction interconnect with anxiety and depression, finding "FoMO on information" was the most central symptom linking these digital age phenomena to poorer mental health outcomes.

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Conclusion

FOMO wasn't dreamed up by a psychologist or a marketing team. It came from one student's real need and real concern, after 9/11, not to waste one single minute, which was distilled down to a satirical newspaper piece in less than an hour. Twenty years on, it is a term supported by a growing body of psychological studies that correlate it with true anxiety, social media addiction, and lower well-being, especially among youth.