You open LinkedIn at 9pm and a coworker has posted about the internal tool they built over the weekend. A friend mentions, casually, that their team has “fully integrated” AI into their workflow. Someone on your timeline is on their third Claude project this month. You close the app and feel a quiet, specific kind of tight in your chest. Not quite dread. Not quite envy. Something more like, am I the only one not doing this.
That feeling has started showing up in my office frequently. Researchers have started calling it FOMA, fear of missing out on AI. It is a real thing, distinct from regular FOMO, and it is hitting knowledge workers in San Francisco with particular force.
It is not a fear of AI. It is a fear of being left behind by it.
Regular FOMO is about missing a rewarding social experience. Everyone is at the party, you are not at the party, and you feel that small sting of being on the outside of something fun. The comparison is painful but the stakes are mostly emotional.
FOMA keeps the social comparison piece but swaps out what is at stake. The message is no longer you are missing out on fun. It is everyone around you is building with AI and getting ahead, and if you are not doing the same, you will be left behind. The worry is about career, identity, and relevance, not about missing a good time.
In my work with clients in tech, I have started hearing a specific version of this almost weekly. It usually shows up not as fear but as pressure. The sentence is rarely “I am worried about AI.” It is closer to “I should be doing more with this.” The word should is the issue in that sentence.
Recent research on FOMA in the workplace identifies three main dimensions.
The first is anxiety about falling behind. This is the peer-comparison version. Other people seem to be learning faster, shipping faster, talking about AI with more fluency, and you feel yourself slipping relative to them.
The second is anxiety about not getting access to the benefits. This is the concern that AI is creating real advantages, such as productivity, earnings, or opportunity. The worry is that without more effort, you will miss out on these benefits.
The third is anxiety about your skills becoming obsolete. This is the one hitting knowledge workers the hardest right now. It is the worry that the specific thing you spent years getting good at, writing, analyzing, designing, coding, managing, is quietly being replaced by a tool.
Each of these is a legitimate concern in isolation. What makes FOMA corrosive is that for a lot of people, all three are running in the background at once, and they do not switch off at the end of the workday.
One of the clearest signs that FOMA has moved from a passing worry to a chronic stressor is when rest starts to feel risky. You close the laptop on a Saturday and feel a low hum of guilt. You pick up a book that is not about AI and notice a pull back toward your phone. You finish a day of actual work and still have the sense that you have not done enough, because you did not also spend an hour tinkering with a new model.
That guilt at rest is not a productivity signal. It is an anxiety signal. Your system is treating a perceived future threat, falling behind, as if it were a current emergency, and it does not know how to calm down.
This is why FOMA shows up so often alongside the patterns I see in chronic low-grade exhaustion. The body does not actually distinguish between a real threat and a persistent internal one. A chronic low-grade stressor that never fully turns off is still a chronic stressor. For people in tech, whose relationship to work already leans toward always-on, FOMA can quietly push a sustainable pace into an unsustainable one.
The most useful approach is to treat FOMA as an anxiety response rather than as an accurate read on your current situation.
The distinction matters. Anxiety that you feel in the moment is often a prediction about the worst possible thing happening in the future. FOMA tells you, with real urgency, that you are falling behind right now. But “falling behind” is not an observation, it is a biased forecast. A bias built on social media posts, the loudest coworker on Slack, and on a rapidly shifting industry narrative.
I often ask clients to pause and notice the difference between what they are feeling and what they actually know. They identify anxiety and the accompanying thought I am going to be left behind. What they actually know, if they slow down, is usually some version of I am employed. I am doing my job. I have fearful thoughts about the future. Creating the space between what is objectively happening and what we think could happen is the skill.
Naming the pressure for what it is, a perceived fear of the future rather than a factual report on where you stand today, does not make it disappear. It does make it workable. This is closely related to a pattern I wrote about in when AI advice starts to replace your own judgment: the more we outsource the read on our own situation to external inputs, the harder it becomes to trust what we actually see when we look at our own life.
A little FOMA is likely unavoidable right now. You live in a moment of real technological change, and some ambient alertness to that is reasonable. The threshold I pay attention to, clinically, is when the pressure starts to affect your daily life functioning.
FOMA can be an issue if it is affecting your sleep, making it harder to focus during the workday, eroding your sense of your own competence, or if it is pulling you away from people and activities that usually sustain you. If this is the case, then grinding harder on AI tools tends to make it worse.
This is the kind of pressure that responds well to therapy. It is anxious in structure, it has identifiable triggers, and it often sits on top of burnout patterns that were already there before AI entered the picture.
If this kind of pressure feels familiar, the therapists at Good Therapy SF work with tech professionals in San Francisco who are familiar with this situation. You can reach out for a free 15-minute consultation to see if it is a good fit.
About the Author. Dr. Tom McDonagh is a licensed clinical psychologist and the founder of Good Therapy SF. His practice specializes in anxiety, burnout, OCD, and related concerns, with a particular focus on the mental health of tech workers in San Francisco. Good Therapy SF is located at The Flood Building, 870 Market Street, Suite 617, San Francisco, CA 94102.
