Rebecca Rowson

What is the fear of missing out (FOMO)? I construe FOMO as a kind of fear which represents its object as absent and distinguish it from nearby phenomena such as regret and loneliness. This construal raises a tension. Philosophers understand fear as representing objects as dangerous, but it is less than clear how experiences of absence pose a threat to the subject. I argue that the threat is to be explained socially. I take FOMO to involve a representation of some absent experience as posing a threat to one’s social connections.

I argue that the direct perception of emotion (DP) is best conceived in terms of event perception, rather than fact perception or object perception. On neither of these two traditional models can the perception of emotion be as direct as its counterpart in ordinary perception; the proponent of DP must either drop the ‘direct’ claim or embrace a part-whole model of emotion perception and its problems. But our best account of how we perceive events directly can be applied to emotion perception without any loss in directness. Not only this but there are good reasons to think that such a conception better respects both empirical evidence and the phenomenology of emotion perception.