FOMO Is Making You Miss Out
- Randall Self
- 6 hours ago
- 10 min read
How the Fear of Missing Out became the greatest travel mistake of our time — and what a 17th-century English gentleman can teach us about fixing it
It is late afternoon in Oia, and the queue stretches back further than you can see.
A thousand people are waiting — phones raised, elbows out — for the precise moment the sun meets the Aegean. The blue-domed church is there, exactly as it appeared in the photo that made you book the trip. In forty minutes, give or take, the light will turn golden, the crowd will collectively exhale, and a thousand identical images will begin their journey to Instagram.
You will have been there. You will have proof.
But here is the question nobody standing in that queue is asking: Who is this for?
The iconic shot isn't for you. It's for everybody else.
That is the quiet bargain at the heart of modern travel, and it has a name: FOMO — the Fear of Missing Out. The fear that somewhere, someone is having the experience you should be having. The fear that if you don't stand in the queue, you missed the point. The fear that travel is a checklist, and the checklist must be completed.
Here is the irony that this article is built on: FOMO is making you miss out.
Not metaphorically. Literally. The fear of missing out is the precise mechanism that guarantees you will miss everything worth seeing. And a 17th-century Englishman who crossed the Alps in a carriage figured this out long before the first Instagram post was ever published.
When Everyone Goes Everywhere at Once
Overtourism is not a new complaint. But its current scale is something genuinely different.
Rome's Trevi Fountain now draws roughly 9 million visitors a year, with peak days reaching 70,000 people — at a single fountain, in a small piazza never designed to hold them. As of February 2026, the city began charging a €2 fee simply to descend the steps and get close to the water. Not to enter a museum. Not to see a painting. To stand near a fountain.
Venice tells a starker story. In 1950, roughly 175,000 people lived in the historic city. Today, fewer than 50,000 remain. The tourists didn't just overwhelm Venice. They hollowed it out. The city that exists for visitors is slowly ceasing to exist for anyone else.
Barcelona has had enough. In the summer of 2024, residents took to the streets with water pistols, spraying tourists at outdoor cafés. Their signs said everything a policy document cannot: "My city's not your fun park." "Barcelona not for sale." These were not fringe voices. They were 20,000 people who had watched their neighborhoods transform into a stage set for other people's social media.
This is what the checklist has built.
How We Got Here
Three forces converged to create the overtourism crisis, and they are worth naming clearly because understanding them is the first step toward opting out.
Budget aviation democratized access to the world's great cities. This was genuinely good. More people traveling, more broadly, to more places — in principle, a remarkable development. The problem is that access was democratized while the destinations were not. Everyone gained the ability to go to Paris. Almost no one was pointed toward Umbria.
Social media transformed travel from experience into performance. The photograph was always part of travel — even the Grand Tourists sketched and painted their way across Europe. But the smartphone introduced an audience, and the audience changed everything. You are no longer traveling to see something. You are traveling to be seen seeing it. The shot is social proof — evidence, submitted to your followers, that you were there. That it happened. That you are the kind of person who goes to places like this.
The checklist completed the transformation. Paris, Rome, Venice, Santorini. The Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain, the blue dome in Oia. These are not travel destinations anymore. They are obligations. Boxes to be checked. And the cruelest part is that checking them delivers almost nothing — because you are not there to experience the place. You are there to document having been there.
The Cities Pushing Back
The destinations themselves are beginning to say what the travelers have not yet understood.
Destination | Action Taken |
Venice | €5 day-tripper entry fee (2024) |
Rome | €2 Trevi Fountain basin fee (February 2026) |
Barcelona | Short-term rental ban by 2028; tourist tax increases |
Amsterdam | Cutting sea cruises from 190 to 100 by 2026; relocating cruise terminal |
Santorini | 8,000 daily cruise passenger cap; no new accommodations approved |
Mykonos | €20 per-person cruise passenger fee in peak season |
Dubrovnik | Maximum 2 cruise ships per day, 4,000 passengers |
Kyoto | Security barriers and access restrictions in the Gion district |
Edinburgh | First UK city to introduce a visitor levy |
Reykjavik | Airbnb license caps; tour bus limits |
San Sebastián | Tourist groups capped at 25 people; loudspeakers banned |
Nice | Cruise ships over 900 passengers prohibited (July 2025) |
Consider Santorini specifically. In 2023, the island hosted 3.4 million tourists and 800 cruise ships — for a permanent population of 15,500 residents. The narrow streets of Oia now see queues of up to 20 minutes for a single photograph. The mayor has capped daily cruise passengers at 8,000 and frozen all new accommodation approvals.
The destinations are not being unfriendly. They are being honest about what the checklist has done to them.
They Solved This in 1641
In the mid-17th century, wealthy young Englishmen developed a custom that sounds, on its surface, like an extremely long vacation. They called it the Grand Tour.
The premise was simple: upon completing their formal education, young men of means would spend months — sometimes years — traveling through France and Italy. They would study languages, attend lectures, visit studios and churches and ruins, develop relationships with artists and intellectuals and aristocrats across the continent, and return home transformed. Not just cultured, but genuinely changed — shaped by sustained immersion in places and ideas that could not be absorbed any other way.
The goals were three: education, immersion, and connection. Not documentation. Not proof. Not the shot.
Consider John Evelyn. He left England in 1641 as the Civil War made staying uncomfortable, and spent years moving through the continent — Paris, Lyon, Geneva, Turin, then south through Florence, Rome, and Naples, then north again through Venice and across the Alps via the Mont Cenis Pass. He studied anatomy in Padua. He learned Italian from local tutors. He crossed paths with artists, scientists, and statesmen. He recorded everything — not for an audience, but for himself.
He came home and became a founding member of the Royal Society. He wrote Sylva, the foundational English text on forestry, commissioned by the Royal Navy. He wrote Fumifugium, one of the earliest works on urban air pollution. He corresponded with the greatest minds of his age. He was, by any measure, a polymath.
He went on a long European vacation. He came home and changed the intellectual landscape of England.
The Grand Tour did that. Not despite being slow and immersive and unhurried, but because of it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who made his own Italian journey a century later, understood this completely. In his travel journal, he wrote that nothing could compare to the new life that the discovery of another country provides for a thoughtful person — that though he remained himself, he believed he had been changed to the bones.
Changed to the bones. Not changed to the camera roll. To the bones.
Henry James, watching a later generation of tourists descend on Venice, was less generous. "Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice," he observed, "there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors." He wrote that in 1909. The water pistols in Barcelona suggest the sentiment has only aged well.
The Joy of Missing Out
Let me tell you about Santorini — not as a destination, but as a case study in what the checklist costs.
As a travel agent, I have sent clients to Santorini who didn't want the cruise ship version of the experience. They wanted the real thing: the caldera views, the white walls, the Aegean light. They were right to want it. Santorini is genuinely extraordinary.
Here is what the checklist looked like for them.
The cruise passengers arrived by tender, shuffled through Oia in organized groups for two hours, photographed the church, and returned to the ship. They were in Santorini. They saw nothing.
The next tier paid $1,000 to $1,500 a night for THE view — and watched the sunset from their terrace surrounded by everyone else who had also paid $1,000 to $1,500 for THE view. It was beautiful. It was also a performance, and they were both audience and cast.
My clients took a third option. A wonderful hotel at $750 a night — private balcony, stunning sunset, real Aegean views, not quite THE iconic angle but genuinely spectacular. I warned them about the crowds. They thought I was a genius when they saw what those crowds actually looked like.
But what most people never consider is a fourth option.
Three hundred dollars a night on Folegandros. A volcanic island an hour by ferry from Santorini. A hotel with a terrace. A beach accessible only by footpath, where the only sound is the water. The same Aegean sun descending into the same Aegean sea, watched by you and perhaps three other people who also found their way there.
No queue. No audience. No proof required.
JOMO — the Joy of Missing Out — is not about staying home. It is about going somewhere that is actually yours. And the extraordinary thing — the thing the checklist never tells you — is that it almost always costs less.
Same sea. Completely different life.
How to Travel Like John Evelyn
Six principles. Each one is older than Instagram. Each one is cheaper than peak-season Santorini.
Go off-season. The Grand Tourists didn't optimize their travel around peak conditions — they stayed until they were ready to leave, which often meant arriving in autumn and departing in spring. February in the south of France is a completely different country from August in the south of France. One of them is yours.
Stay outside the center. Versailles instead of Paris. Rotterdam instead of Amsterdam. Orvieto instead of Rome. The satellite city gives you access to the great destination without the density, the prices, or the exhaustion. You are also, almost without exception, staying somewhere more interesting.
Use a hub. Three to four nights minimum in one place, day trips outward, one unpacking. This is precisely what the Grand Tourists did — they arrived somewhere, settled in, and learned it. The modern habit of moving every night produces itineraries, not experiences.
Hire local guides. The Grand Tourists traveled with cicerones — local guides who knew not just where things were but what they meant. The best intelligence has always been local. A morning with someone who grew up in Orvieto will show you things no travel site has indexed.
Skip the iconic shot. It is social proof, not memory. It belongs to your followers, not to you. The question to ask at every famous view is not how do I capture this but what do I actually want to feel here. The answer will usually take you somewhere quieter.
Build around what you love. The Grand Tour was never a generic itinerary — it was shaped by the traveler's interests, connections, and curiosity. Apple harvest in Normandy. Cycling the Algarve coast. Walking the Camino Primitivo through the mountains of Asturias. The trip that follows your genuine interests will take you, almost by definition, away from where everyone else is going.
Two Modern Grand Tours
Not an itinerary. A week's worth of possibilities — enough to spark something.
Umbria, Italy — Base: Orvieto
A hilltop city built on volcanic rock, its cathedral facade so ornate it looks like embroidery in stone. One week here might include a morning in Civita di Bagnoregio — a medieval village accessible only by footbridge, slowly being reclaimed by the hillside it was built on. Wine tasting in Montefalco, home of Sagrantino, one of Italy's most distinctive reds, grown nowhere else on earth. Truffle hunting outside Norcia with a local and his dog, followed by lunch that will ruin all future pasta. The underground city of Orvieto — a labyrinth of Etruscan tunnels carved directly beneath the living streets above. A Sunday market in a village where you may be the only tourist who has ever arrived without a tour bus.
Everyone knows Tuscany. Nobody talks about Umbria. They share a border.
Asturias, Spain — Base: Oviedo
A Roman city in green, coastal northern Spain that the guidebooks have largely ignored and the crowds have never found. One week here might include walking a section of the Camino Primitivo — the original pilgrimage route to Santiago, older and quieter than the Camino Francés, through mountain villages that haven't changed their rhythm in centuries. The pre-Romanesque churches of Santa María del Naranco and San Miguel de Lillo, UNESCO World Heritage sites built in the 9th century on a hillside above the city — older than the great cathedrals of Europe, and on most days, nearly empty. The best seafood of your life in Gijón's harbor, where the boats that caught it docked that morning. Cabrales — a blue cheese aged in mountain caves so pungent and so particular that it can only be produced in a handful of Asturian villages. Sidra poured from a height in a century-old sidrería, exactly as it has been done here since before anyone thought to write it down.
The Grand Tourists never made it to Asturias. The roads were too poor and the politics too complicated. That is, improbably, still your advantage.
Travel For You
The queue in Oia is still there.
The phones are still raised. The sun is still going down over the same Aegean Sea it has been going down over for ten thousand years. In forty minutes, a thousand identical photographs will begin their journey to Instagram, and a thousand people will have been somewhere without being there at all.
John Evelyn didn't have a camera. He crossed the Alps in a carriage, learned Italian from strangers, studied anatomy for the pleasure of understanding, and came home changed to the bones. It took him years. It made him a polymath. Nobody asked him for proof.
You don't need years. You need a week, a willingness to miss the queue, and someone who knows where the beach is.
FOMO is making you miss out. The cure is simpler than you think.
Travel for you.
Randall Self is the owner of Amerigo Travel, an independent agency within the Avoya Travel Network specializing in European cultural travel and river and ocean cruising. amerigotravel.co | Navigate with Purpose.
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