How I Cope With AI FOMO
There’s a particular dread that hits when I’m deep in AI news at eleven at night. Someone I’ve never heard of just raised forty million dollars. Someone else pivoted their channel six months ago and now has a million subscribers. A guy nowhere near me on the tech tree just landed a seven-figure job at OpenAI.
That’s AI FOMO. If you’re paying attention, you’ve got some version of it. And the popular move — pretending it doesn’t apply to you, minimizing how much AI is actually changing — is just sticking your head in the sand. I’d rather be honest about it.
So here’s my breakdown: what FOMO actually is underneath the word, and the six things I do to keep it from running my life.
Four Flavors of FOMO
Money. The most obvious one. Fortunes are being made right now, and it’s hard not to do the math on the ones that could have been yours. Take Pete Stigler. He built OpenClaw in a few months, watched it go ultraviral, and landed a six- or seven-figure job at OpenAI. I’ve been working on cognitive architectures for four years. That could have been me, and it wasn’t. That’s money FOMO in one sentence.
Status. All social animals care about social status. It’s not optional — it’s part of the human operating system. AI isn’t just minting fortunes, it’s minting fame. Follower counts, prestige, insider credibility, who got invited to what — it’s all sloshing around at a rate your primate brain is exquisitely calibrated to track. (And yes, I run a channel with almost 200,000 subscribers. Status is relative. There is always someone above you whose altitude you feel acutely.)
Opportunity. This one sits above the others. You’re not just missing money or status in themselves — you’re missing the chance at them. Every announcement is a timer counting down on doors you didn’t walk through.
Security. The deepest one. Will I be okay? Will my family be okay? Does the thing I know how to do still exist in five years? This is the engine under a lot of the anxiety. The others dress it up, but security is usually what’s actually shaking.
If you’ve felt all four in the same week, you’re not broken. You’re awake.
Six Things I Do About It
1. Remember we’re still very early.
The loudest FOMO voice insists the best opportunities are already gone. History says otherwise.
I started my YouTube channel before ChatGPT, running experiments on GPT-3. I had about five thousand subscribers when ChatGPT hit. Nine months later I had a hundred thousand. That opportunity did not exist at five thousand subscribers, and I had no idea it was about to. Post-labor economics is the next wave I think is coming, and I’m trying to be early to it. Whether or not I am, the principle holds: the opportunity set is not closed. It never is. Someone building the next OpenClaw right now is someone who, six months ago, also felt late.
2. Accept that some people will win way bigger than you.
There are gaming channels that pivoted to AI and, thanks to a decade of production muscle, lapped me inside a year. There are founders making more in a month than I’ll make this decade. Envy and resentment are the natural response. What do they know that I don’t?
The work is to separate the two. Envy — the honest, grudging admission that I’d like what they have — I just own. I’m a little jealous of some of these people. Fine. Resentment — the story that their winning means I’m losing — I try to drop. The first is a feeling. The second is a framing, and it’s the wrong one.
3. Keep positioning yourself — and remember positioning isn’t only a career move.
When the FOMO energy shows up, I try to route it into something I actually control. I’m a general critic of stoicism, but the one question it gets right — what do I have control over? — is the useful one here. A skill. An essay. A piece of code. The next action on something that’s mine.
Positioning is also bigger than career. My wife and I moved to a small town and bought a cottage on the edge of it. It’s cheap. The burn rate is low. That’s positioning too — maybe the most durable kind, because it lowers the size of the win I need in order to be fine. A lot of AI FOMO is high-burn-rate anxiety wearing a costume.
4. Stay grounded in history — including your own.
The grand arc helps: industrial revolutions, Engels’ pause, the Luddite rebellions. None of it was clean. People made it through.
The personal arc helps more. My dad was a second- or third-generation immigrant. When his family first got to America they were dirt poor — my aunt told me they once lived in a shack on a beach with no power and no running water. That kind of poverty leaves a mark that travels. My dad made half a million a year running his business and still refused to replace his ancient riding lawnmower, which broke down constantly. On one family vacation, his old truck stranded us on the side of the road for nine hours. That was poverty mindset — survival habits outliving the conditions that required them.
I went the other direction. I’ll spend money to keep things working because I’d rather not be on the shoulder of the interstate for nine hours. But I also know, because I’ve been there, that the worst cases are survivable. During the Great Recession I was briefly homeless — about a month living in a car. That’s not the same as being chronically unhoused, and I won’t pretend it was. But it sucked, and I got through it, and every piece of AI FOMO I’ve felt since has had to answer to that fact.
When I remember what my family survived, and what I survived, the stakes of not being first to market on a wrapper app get a little smaller.
5. Drop the competition frame.
A lot of FOMO is ordinal thinking — there are winners, there are losers, you’re being ranked. That’s a zero-sum game running inside a world that mostly isn’t one.
Every line of code I’ve ever shipped is open source. Part of that is temperament, but part of it is a bet: the world I want to live in has more automation and more abundance in it, and the fastest way to get there is to let other people build on what I’ve done. I’ll capture some of that value by living in that world. The rest I capture in the thing you can’t get from a royalty check — the message, once a week or so, from someone telling me the memory system I built two years ago solved a problem they were stuck on.
Reframed like that, the enemy isn’t the next guy. The enemy is despair. It’s player-versus-environment, not player-versus-player. Or, the old line: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
6. Get offline.
I’ve been on the couch for eighteen months. I spend more time online than I’d choose to. What I’ve learned is that the cheapest, most reliable antidote to FOMO is also the simplest: turn it all off.
I keep an egg timer. I set it for an hour, kill every screen, and let myself get genuinely bored. Within five minutes I’m cleaning the house. By the time the timer rings I have no urge to turn the screens back on. The FOMO is not a fact about the world. It’s a fact about what you’ve been staring at for the last ninety minutes.
None of this makes the feeling go away. I still get it. I got it this week. But naming the four flavors and running through the six moves is usually enough to pull me out of the low-grade panic scroll and back into doing the next thing I actually have control over. That’s the whole game.
If you’re reading this: close the tab. Set a timer. Be bored for an hour. See what happens.
