My Year of JOMO
Reflections on the Joy Of Missing Out and Libertarian Escapism
Dear Friends,
You surely know the story of the banker from Mexico City who spends his family vacation at a beach resort next door to a fishing village. Over the course of his stay, the banker observes that the nearby fishermen only work two hours each day while they haul in the nets and gut the fish. The rest of the day they drink beer, tell stories, play dominoes, and stare out across the sea. On his last day of vacation, the banker approaches the fishermen to convince them of the value of hard work, savings, and investment. “Why don’t you invest in more boats and larger nets?” he asks them. “Why not purchase a refrigerated truck so that you can sell fresh fish directly to urban supermarkets without losing profits to middlemen? Why not open your own restaurant along the highway and serve fish tacos to the wealthy foreigners?”
“Why should we do all of that?” they want to know.
“So that you’ll be rich!” he grins with enthusiasm.
“Why do we want to be rich?” they ask.
“So that then you can retire on the beach and spend your days drinking beer, telling stories, playing dominoes, and staring out across the sea!”
JOMO
In my day job, I play the role of the banker from Mexico City, traveling to other countries and frequently offering unsolicited advice about economic and political development. Over the past two weeks, though, I have been firmly on team fishing village and it has been glorious.
I couldn’t muster the courage to entirely let go of the seduction of planning and productivity. For the past few years, Iris and I have spent the last week of December and first week of January filling out the free, year-end worksheets that create a map for the rest of the year in our Ink & Volt planners. (We have a book shelf of these aesthetically pleasing planners; a visual reminder of how dreams become goals, to-do lists, and eventually reality.)
2023 is going to be a doozy. After seven years of working at Hewlett Foundation, my 8-year term limit is up in October. After 13 years of working in philanthropy, it’s time for a major career change. After nearly ten years of living in the United States, Iris and I will move back to Mexico. A chapter is closing, a new chapter is opening up.
The second page of my 2023 planner asks me to define a theme for the year. “When you wake up every morning,” it asks me, “what is your mantra?”
“JOMO,” I reply. The Joy of Missing Out. I will become so absorbed in every moment of every day that distraction holds no temptation. No more wondering what else I could be doing, what others might be doing. The courage and intuition to say no. The courage and intuition to say yes. Each day, a modest collection of minor moments of meaning. My friend Jamie came across a quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery that captures the vibe: “Perfection is attained not when no more can be added, but when no more can be removed.”
I want to be wide awake, undistracted, for every moment during my last year in California. (I mean, if not for the rest of my life.)
Libertarian Escapism (Let’s move to the country)
After nearly a decade of living in the United States, Iris and I will return to Mexico toward the end of this year. Oaxaca, specifically. And not even Oaxaca the city.
When Iris told me that she booked a one-room cottage up in the mountains for ten days, I replied: “Ten days? Isn’t that kind of a long time?” Eat my words, Sasaki. By the end of our stay, we decided that this is where we will live. (Granted, when I say “up in the mountains,” I should clarify that it’s only a 20-minute drive or 35-minute bike ride to Oaxaca’s central plaza.)
My entire life I have been an urban creature who reads books about urban theory at overpriced coffee shops. Richard Sennett is my favorite urban theorist and during my 20s I adored his shit-talking about the suburbs: “Suburbanites are people who are afraid to live in a world they cannot control,” he wrote. Here’s how I described his classic, The Uses of Disorder:
To enter a suburb is to enter a comfortable house party with your closest friends, your favorite music, the kids playing in the pool, everything under control. City life forces us to develop the social aptitude to negotiate uncomfortable situations, to make them comfortable. Cities offer us a path to the greatest reaches of social maturity. We form communities that aren't fixed or homogeneous, but rather that constantly shift, teetering on chaos and serendipity. We must become strong, and confident in ourselves, to engage in such diversity and dynamism.
Sennett published The Uses of Disorder in 1970 when he was just 27 years old. I wonder how his argument holds up today when every other New Yorker is staring down at a cell phone, sealed off by AirPods, rushing to some algorithmic recommendation. Whether or not Sennett’s 1970 argument about cities and suburbs is relevant today, I still feel guilty about leaving urban life.
That sense of guilt grew larger still after reading Hari Kunzru’s opening essay in this month’s Harper’s, which explores the attempts of West Coast libertarians to escape “politics” — or what Sennett would call “negotiating uncomfortable situations.” Kunzru quotes a 2009 essay by Peter Thiel: “In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms—from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy.’ ”
Over the past ten days, Iris and I met plenty of these West Coast libertarian types who fled to Oaxaca to escape wokeism, vaccines, taxes, and building permits. “Here, I can do whatever I want,” one of them told me. “I mean, as long I don’t kill anyone.” They don’t seem to know their Oaxacan neighbors or have much of a desire to meet them.
Iris and I are not fleeing anything. We love California. We love quirky Berkeley. We love our crazy neighbors. The freedom of semi-rural life is calling, but it’s not the freedom of escapism; no, it’s the freedom to become deeply enmeshed in a local community where people work with their hands, build their own homes, and help out their neighbors.
If tomorrow is your first day back at work, may it start slowly.
Have a wonderful week,
David
Hey David, that’s powerful!
Wishing you the best throughout the year and with your move! 💛
#JOMO2023+
This may very well be my favorite post from you. It reads so poetic (or maybe I was in a blissful state reading this in my taxi freshly off the plane from Siargao Island) and as always, I am so floored by the amount of references and practical and unpractical knowledge you carry in that head. And JOMO is going to be my 2023nergy. Carry on my friend.