Erich Fromm’s To Have or to Be: What Consumer Society Buried Beneath Our Possessions
The Weight of What You Own
Consider the peculiar anxiety that follows a major purchase. You have acquired the thing you wanted—the car, the apartment, the device that promised to simplify your life—and yet within weeks a quiet unease sets in. The object has not changed, but the thrill has evaporated, replaced by a dull need for the next acquisition. We rarely pause to ask why satisfaction expires so quickly, or what it means that our sense of self depends so heavily on what we possess. Erich Seligmann Fromm (1900–1980), the German-American psychoanalyst and humanistic philosopher, spent a lifetime tracing this malaise to its root. His answer was as simple as it was devastating: we have confused having with being, and the confusion is killing us.
The Two Modes of Existence
In To Have or to Be? (1976), Fromm drew a line through the centre of human existence. On one side stood what he called the having mode—a way of relating to the world through possession, accumulation, and control. On the other, the being mode—a way of relating through experience, connection, and creative aliveness. The distinction was not merely psychological. Fromm argued that entire civilisations organise themselves around one mode or the other, and that modern industrial society had committed itself, almost without reflection, to the mode of having.
What made Fromm’s analysis so penetrating was his refusal to treat materialism as a personal vice. The having mode is not a character flaw; it is a structural condition. When an economy requires perpetual consumption to sustain itself, it must produce subjects who define their identity through what they own. The consumer does not choose greed; the system cultivates it as a survival mechanism. Fromm had already demonstrated in Escape from Freedom (1941) that modern individuals, overwhelmed by the burden of genuine autonomy, flee into authoritarian conformity. In To Have or to Be?, he extended the argument: the marketplace offers a softer escape—the comforting illusion that you are what you possess.
If I am what I have and if I lose what I have, who then am I?
— Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? (1976)
This single question exposes the existential fragility at the core of consumer identity. In the having mode, the self is a warehouse: its value is measured by inventory. Lose the inventory—through unemployment, illness, financial crisis—and the self collapses, because nothing was constructed beneath the possessions. Fromm understood that this was not merely a philosophical problem but a clinical one: the anxiety disorders, the chronic dissatisfaction, the nameless depression that saturates affluent societies are symptoms of a self built on sand.
Being in a World Designed for Having
The being mode, by contrast, does not accumulate; it participates. To read a poem in the being mode is not to memorise it for future citation but to allow it to alter the texture of your perception. To love in the being mode is not to possess another person but to engage in the shared labour of mutual becoming. Fromm drew on sources as diverse as Meister Eckhart, Karl Marx, and Buddhist philosophy to show that the being mode is not an exotic spiritual luxury but a fundamental human capacity—one that industrial capitalism has systematically atrophied.
The digital economy of our era has intensified this atrophy beyond what Fromm could have anticipated. Social media platforms convert lived experience itself into a commodity: the sunset is photographed not for remembrance but for display, the meal is staged before it is tasted, the journey is narrated in real time for an audience of followers whose approval functions as a new form of property. We have learned to have our experiences rather than to be in them. The being mode does not vanish; it simply becomes harder to access, buried under layers of performative accumulation.
Reclaiming the Capacity to Be
Fromm never pretended that the transition from having to being could be accomplished by individual willpower alone. A society structured around consumption will reproduce the having mode in every institution—its schools, its workplaces, its definitions of success. The shift requires not merely personal conversion but structural reimagination: economies that measure well-being rather than output, education that cultivates curiosity rather than credentials, communities that value presence over productivity. These are not utopian fantasies; they are practical experiments already underway in cooperative movements, degrowth initiatives, and care economies around the world.
Yet Fromm also insisted that the revolution begins in the small acts of daily life. Each moment in which you choose attention over acquisition—listening instead of planning your reply, walking without a destination, sitting with uncertainty rather than purchasing a quick solution—is a micro-rebellion against the having mode. The being mode is not a destination to be reached; it is a practice to be sustained, an ongoing act of refusal against a world that insists you are nothing more than the sum of your possessions.
Fromm asked us to imagine a life measured not by what we have accumulated but by what we have dared to become. Half a century later, his question has not softened; it has sharpened.
When you set aside everything you own—every title, every account, every object that bears your name—what remains? And is it enough?
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