Scroll through social media and you’ll see friends eating at new restaurants, enjoying vacations, and savoring time on the beach. You on the other hand, you’re trying to meet a deadline, shoveling snow from your driveway, running after your toddler.

Instead of being a fun diversion, your friends’ posts make you feel anxious and inadequate for not seeing the world. In short, they give you FOMO: Fear of Missing Out.

FOMO isn’t going away any time soon. Every day it gets harder to put down our phones and disconnect, which means these anxieties are only going to increase. How do we fight against them and convince ourselves that our lives—and we—are enough?

A 2010 study in Applied Research in Quality of Life found that looking forward to vacations boosts your happiness for eight weeks. What’s more, research suggests that you are actually happier planning your trip than you are being on the trip.

So Long, FOMO is my attempt to use this knowledge in our favor. I’ve been creating random travel itineraries for ages and certainly credit them for helping me stay sane when times get tough. My goal here is to share these itineraries with you and work together to create new ones.

We may not always have the time and money to get to everything on our lists, but there’s still a whole wide world to explore — now let’s get to it!

Cheers,
Lauren Englisbe