Patrick J. McGinnis

Who they are

McGinnis was an MBA student at Harvard Business School, class of 2004, when the column appeared. The Harbus republished the column in its archive in 2023 and described him in a 2019 article as the person "who created the term FOMO while a student at HBS".

This page records only what the column and the paper's own published record state. Biography beyond that is not given here.

Key papers

Social Theory at HBS: McGinnis' Two FOs (2004). Written as students neared graduation, the column set out a comic framework for student social life. It began from the observation that most school-wide invitations drew a reply from fewer than half of those invited. It then named two forces. FOMO, in the column's words: "In this state of social flux, FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out, weighs heavily on the psyche." FOBO, the fear of a better option, "drives us in the other direction", leading people to avoid committing in case something better arrives. The column described a single evening of back-to-back events and suggested that an imbalance between the two fears could leave someone afraid of doing anything at all.

The column's examples are social: parties, reunion drinks, dinners, a sports game and group travel plans. It makes no claim about shopping, prices or purchases.

Key ideas

The column matters to this site because of where it sits in the history of the idea. FOMO entered wide use as a piece of campus comedy about crowded social calendars. The research construct, with a formal definition and a ten-item scale, came nine years later from Andrew K. Przybylski and colleagues, and the studies linking it to spending came later still. Anyone treating fear of missing out as an established cause of buying is working with a term whose origin is a joke about invitations.

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