I’m a proud, card-carrying member of the Dull Men’s Club

Move over, FOMO, there is a new term that proves if you’re the boring type ... and many love it.

Rory Gibson.

I had never heard of JOMO until I started poking around the website of the Dull Men’s Club.

It stands for “joy of missing out” and is the opposite of the more common FOMO (fear of missing out), a condition that plagues those who can’t keep their noses out of social media.

I don’t suffer from FOMO but I’ve come to realise I love a good dose of JOMO. The Dull Men’s Club revels in it too.

In its “About Us” section on the website and Facebook pages, the DMC proudly claims its members “avoid the glitz and the glam”.

“We don’t need to keep up with the latest fads. We enjoy what we already have instead of constantly moving on to the next big thing. We are not always trying to achieve and acquire more. We don’t suffer from moreitus.”

Surprisingly for an organisation that frowns on ambition, the DMC has nearly 2 million members worldwide, including an Australian chapter with some 8000 dullards.

They celebrate the mundane and try to outdo each other with prosaic pursuits. For instance there’s online sections dedicated to photographs of park benches, apostrophe abuse and odometer readings.

A man in Britain was lauded by the DMC when he finished a six-year project to park in every one of the 211 car spaces at his local shopping centre.

As usually happens whenever men set up anything for themselves, women demand to be part of it instead of just setting up their own club. So the Dull Men’s Club now has women members, which I thought would’ve been a risky development for an organisation dedicated to toning down the excitement.

But back to JOMO. Perhaps it’s a sign of advancing decrepitude but I find while I still get excited about being invited to things, when the day arrives to go I’d rather stay home and count the lorikeets in the poinciana tree next door while watching the sunset.

It was an interesting feature of the Covid years that so many people reported loving the feeling of not being required to do much at all except stay home and amuse themselves. Perhaps that glimpse into a life where one had to connect with their immediate surroundings and the people in them offers clues on how to thrive in what is an increasingly frazzled world.

So hats off to those dull men leading the way back to sanity … not that they’d want the attention.

Originally published as I’m a proud, card-carrying member of the Dull Men’s Club