I’ve decided to miss out on more these days.

Maybe you’ve heard of FOMO, the “fear of missing out.” Well, this is the opposite. I’m trying to find JOMO, the “joy of missing out.”

For my JOMO education, I can thank Christina Crook, an author who specializes in “digital decluttering.” She encourages people to intentionally disconnect from ingesting social media, doomscrolling news sites and other online activities that we know make us insecure and anxious but that we take part in anyway.

No one had to suggest to me that posting, replying or scrolling might be bad for my mental health. When I log off Instagram or put down my phone, I’m always more stressed than when I started. Sometimes, I’m still actively mad, for example, about someone flippantly saying that 800,000 Sudanese people starving to death after Trump shut off their U.S. Agency for International Development-provided food supply would be worth it to identify wasteful spending in the agency.

But as furious, frustrated or sad as I am, I’m never energized — not to do anything for myself or my family, not even to do anything for those poor Sudanese people, who I have no clue how to help. The despair is paralyzing, in fact. All I want to do is crawl under the covers until things get better.

Being connected online these days feels like much more of a curse than a blessing. But I keep doing it in no small part because of FOMO. I’m worried I’ll miss a funny video on Instagram. I’m afraid I won’t hear about some important news event. I’m constantly thinking about whether I could be living my life cheaper, better or more happily with the tips from other people who seem to have it all figured out.

The truth, though, is that all those fears are an illusion.

Here’s how Crook puts it: “The fear of missing out is a sneaky, sinister vapor. It seeps in from somewhere outside of you. It deceives, saying: You are not doing enough. You don’t have enough. You are not enough.”

Insecurity and fear may not be healthy, but they’re certainly powerful motivators.

There’s a reason there are literally millions of social media influencers (as many as 127 million, by some accounts), and experts say those numbers are constantly rising.

Influencers, and social media in general, promise that you can have more of everything. You can have more things, more money, more love, more sex, more attention and more happiness. To win them, all you have to do is stay online, keep coming back to the slot machine and pumping in the quarters of your time. And like an actual slot machine, the payoff is infrequent and incomplete.

It’s hard to resist the pull of “more.” As humans, we’re engineered to want it. It’s what drew us out of the caves and made us plant crops, build houses and invent computers: We have an instinct to better ourselves.

Somewhere, though, that instinct went haywire and became a cancer that’s threatening to devour us whole.

In the same way that our very natural instinct to keep ourselves fed has turned us into eating machines, our yearning for more has created another kind of machine, a machine of compulsive self-improvement.

I’ve seen a lot of ads on social media these days for different beauty products that all make the same promise: They’ll give you something called “glass skin.” Glass skin is poreless, smooth and shiny — as reflective and solid as the surface of a frozen lake.

Now, I did not have “glass skin” when I was 36, 26 or even 16, so I’m certainly not going to get it now. But these ads make me feel as if I’m missing out if I don’t at least try. I know it’s unrealistic. I know pores are normal. But I’m always at least tempted to buy one more skin cream, one more highlighter. Maybe this one will work. Look at all those pictures. …

The reality, though, is that even if I did get glass skin (good luck with that one), I’d still be me, only this time with glass skin. And then I’d be off to chase the next wild goose — thigh gaps or eight-pack abs or Taylor Swift’s hair — spending my time, well-being and money in the hunt.

So I’ve decided to try an alternate approach, missing out a little more and fearing a little less. I know it won’t be easy to resist the siren song of online, no easier than it was for Odysseus’ men to resist the actual siren in “The Odyssey.”

What I need to do is remind myself of what happened to the men who heard the siren’s song in Homer’s tale. They steered into roiling waters, their ships dashed to pieces on rocks as they listened to the siren’s beautiful promise, the familiar promise of more.

And as Odysseus discovered, the only hope may be to plug one’s ears against the noise — joyfully missing out on the song entirely.

EDITOR’S NOTE: To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.