Fear of Missing Out in Digital Culture from a Hadith Perspective and the Prophetic Desire-Attention Regulation Model
Keywords:
Fear of Missing Out, qana’ah, social comparison, digital well-being, attention regulationAbstract
Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) has developed into one of the most prominent psychological experiences in digital culture because users are continuously exposed to other people’s activities, achievements, consumption, relationships, and experiences. Psychological literature has explained FoMO through the need for connectedness, social comparison, problematic social media use, and weak self-regulation, yet Islamic studies tend to stop at general advice about gratitude, qana’ah, or the prohibition of hasad. This article aims to reconstruct a hadith perspective on the mechanisms of FoMO and to propose the conceptual Prophetic Desire-Attention Regulation (PDAR) model. The study employs qualitative library research with an integrative conceptual-hermeneutic design. The primary corpus consists of authentic hadiths concerning qana’ah, ghina al-nafs, the direction of social comparison, ghibtah, the boundlessness of desire for wealth, and the value of health and leisure time. This corpus is read thematically and brought into dialogue with research on FoMO, social comparison, problematic social media use, social media fatigue, and digital well-being. The findings show that FoMO cannot adequately be understood merely as a fear of missing out, but rather as a disturbance in sufficiency calibration, comparison orientation, desire escalation, and attention fragmentation. Hadith does not negate social needs, but regulates the direction of desire and attention so that self-worth is not externally determined by other people’s experiences. The PDAR model consists of five mechanisms: sufficiency anchoring, comparison recalibration, aspirational filtering, desire de-escalation, and attention stewardship. The model offers novelty in the form of a mechanistic and non-moralistic hadith-based framework for Islamic digital literacy, education, da’wah, and the development of empirically testable digital well-being interventions.
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