Latency Guilt: A New Version of FOMO - Triggered by AI

On FOMO, loss aversion, and the strange anxiety of collaborative AI

John Nosta, writing in Psychology Today, describes what happens when he interacts with AI: “My mind usually meanders its way toward an answer. With AI, the answer appears immediately, and we adjust our tempo to match.”

He continues: “We find ourselves deciding faster, not because we suddenly know more, but because the machine invites and almost demands that pace... You step into the machine’s tempo and stay there.”

Lately, I have been noticing a similar trend in my own AI experience.

Charts, graphs, ideas, plans, itineraries, essays, email drafts — coming at me faster than I can process. I’m often engaged and collaborating, just like the books say. I’m making progress, I’m sure of it. And then suddenly I look up.

This is not my beautiful home. This is not my beautiful wife. How did I get here?

I couldn’t tell a bystander whether what I am working with is true, accurate, or even useful. I am dizzy and a bit befuddled. I am lost.

Lately I have been thinking deeply about this feeling. Why it happens, when it happens, and how to guard against it. I was grateful to find John Nosta’s articles on Psychology Today because he put the Earth back under my feet – made me feel like I wasn’t crazy - and started me on the path towards defining a problem that I believe remains under-discussed.

Latency guilt

We all know not to use AI as a servant at this point. Teachers have been pounding this into students for the last few years. Thought leaders repeat it at conferences. Just last week, I asked my WRIT 1002-level students at Fairleigh Dickinson University their opinion of AI’s role in writing, and they all repeated a version of the same concept:

“Don’t let it write for you, but you can use it for ideas and helping you when you’re stuck. Maybe grammar, too.”

I tried to tell them it was okay to be honest with me, but…first day jitters, I guess. They all repeated the advice we were given at the beginning of 2025 – don’t just delegate - brainstorm. Use AI as a thinking partner. Collaborate. Stay engaged.

But brainstorming with AI comes with its own risk. It’s what I call “latency guilt” and it is the feeling that I have to keep up with AI – for some unknown, subconscious, barely articulatable reason.

Let me explain.

When I’m in a real back-and-forth with AI - building, deconstructing, iterating - it responds to most messages that I send with six ideas at once. Sometimes six pages of text. It gives me six (or more) angles - six paths forward.

And for reasons I am only beginning to understand, I grab one and move forward. Underneath that choice is the feeling that if I don’t keep moving forward, I’ll leave something on the table. Meat on the bone. A missed opportunity.

This is what I mean by latency guilt—the feeling that we, mere humans, are the bottleneck. The uncomfortable feeling that I could be doing more, if I was just smart enough, capable enough, AI-enough.

So we skim instead of reading. “We adjust our tempo to match,” as Nosta says. We respond before we’ve fully processed. We treat the conversation like a production line rather than a space for thought.

And when we look up, we’re lost.

FOMO in the Chat

The more I consider this concept, the more I think it has something to do with the age-old concept of FOMO. But I don’t mean social media FOMO. I mean something more innate, something that lives at our core.

Humans are social animals. For most of our history, exclusion from the group meant death. The need to belong, the sensitivity to rejection, the vigilance around status - these are survival mechanisms. The same ones that Chamath Palahapitiya and his cronies at Facebook used to get us addicted to News Feed in 2008. They’re primal, and for centuries they kept us alive.

This shows up in the brain. Research from Harvard, Purdue, and UCLA has found that feelings of exclusion activate the same regions as physical pain. When you feel left out, your nervous system treats it as a threat.

Then there’s loss aversion—the finding, from Kahneman and Tversky’s work, that losses feel roughly twice as painful as equivalent gains feel good. We’re wired to avoid leaving value on the table. The anticipated regret of missing out drives behavior even when there’s nothing concrete to regret yet.

Know the feeling? Now put yourself in a brainstorm with AI.

The AI's speed creates the perception of abundance. There's always more underneath — one more question, one more angle, one more insight waiting to be uncovered. Your brain, ancient and loss-averse, reads "slowing down" as a kind of self-imposed exile from all that potential value.

This may sound intuitive. But is anyone talking about it within the concept of "brainstorming with AI" or "using AI as a thinking partner"? Because that appears to me to have been the great revelation of 2025 — one that has satisfied the masses. If we just tell ourselves it's a colleague, everything will be alright. Right?

Right…?

I don't think that's the case. Slowing down enough to notice when a chat with AI leads to an increased heart rate, higher anxiety, or even a tinge of FOMO — that's the next metacognitive challenge. Noticing when the AI leads us into the desert and drops us off with water, even though we were "engaged" the whole time.

10 bits per second

This also isn’t a fair fight.

One year ago, Caltech researchers Jieyu Zheng and Markus Meister published a paper in Neuron with a title I can't get out of my head: "The unbearable slowness of being." Their finding: human cognition — the speed at which we remember, decide, and imagine — operates at a fixed rate of about 10 bits per second. That's roughly the pace of casual typing. It's a biological ceiling.

For comparison: A YouTube video streams at 8 million bits per second. The fact that we think at 10 bits per second shows just how massive and unfair the mismatch really is. And AI sits somewhere in between, still orders of magnitude faster than thought.

When we're in a real-time exchange with something that processes information hundreds of times faster than we think, our nervous system takes notice. Or at least mine does. We adjust, we speed up, we try to “keep up,” even though our true value is precisely in our ability to slow down and think differently.

But how do you teach that?

Unstudied

I should be honest: I don’t know if any of this is what’s actually happening in the brain. Nobody has run a study measuring amygdala activation when someone pauses mid-brainstorm with ChatGPT. The connection between FOMO psychology and AI interaction is, as far as I can tell, unstudied.

But I notice it in myself. And I doubt I’m alone.

Cognitive scientists have studied what happens when people offload thinking to AI — when they use it as a servant, a ghostwriter, an on-demand answer machine. But has anyone studied what happens when people stay engaged and still lose themselves?

That feels like a different problem. And it might be widespread among people who think they’re using AI responsibly.

If you’re a researcher: this might be worth investigating.

If you’re a user: pay attention. Write it down when it happens. Notice whether the pull to keep going is coming from genuine curiosity — or from something more automatic. Something that feels less like excitement and more like anxiety.

The AI will wait

The AI will wait. It has no preferences. It experiences nothing resembling impatience. The urgency we feel is entirely generated by us.

We don’t need to keep up with AI in the chat. We’re allowed to take a breath. We’re allowed to “touch grass,” as the kids say.

Easier said than done. I’m still working on it myself — trying to build in friction, force reflection, keep the process mine. But the first step was noticing the pull. Naming it.

Anyone else feeling this?