When a book keeps falling into one’s hands over and over again, one may want to start paying attention. Recently, such a book kept showing up for me (“To have or to be?” by Erich Fromm). People kept referencing it to me, it kept showing up in random emails, or I came across it through the few remaining libraries we have here in Southern California. I was puzzled because I wasn’t sure what a book written in the seventies about having vs. being could teach me here and now in 2025. So I kept disregarding the book given my very long list of “must read books” until…well, until I couldn’t. I finally ordered the book and started to dive into it.
It turned out, the book is profoundly insightful and surprisingly apropos where we are today as a society of hyper consumerism and eternal race to have more, accumulate more, need more, and buy more. Fromm writes on the outset: “…observable data show most clearly that our kind of pursuit of happiness does not produce well being. We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent – people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save”. As a data scientist myself, I cannot argue with the overwhelming studies on depression, anxiety, mounting co-morbidity rates, and alarming pharmaceutical drug consumption as we live each day to “have more”.
Let’s back up for a moment. What does it mean “to have” vs. “to be” and what does that have to do with us being happy? Well, as we say nowadays: how you do one thing is how you do everything: how you wake up in the morning, make and drink your cup of coffee, treat your work and co-workers during the day, eat your lunch, pick up your kids, make dinner, fall asleep, etc. We can take any one of these activities and analyze it and we will likely find that you, dear reader, tend to orient yourself to either “have” more or “be” more throughout your day….whether you know it or not, like it or not, acknowledge it or not, you are orienting each day along one of those two…
A good example would be: how, dear reader, do you usually read or listen to your book of choice? Firstly, did you pick it because rationally it would advance some valuable skill? Or did it mysteriously pull you in while you head was scratching itself as to why? When you started reading it, were you double / triple multitasking? Or were you truly present to it? Did you set the speed to 1.2x or higher to race to the finish? Or to 0.9x so you can take in every word and thought? Did you find yourself fast forwarding when you thought you knew enough about a chapter? Or did you find yourself pausing every time an idea raised your curiosity and made you question a statement? As you were listening, were you thinking about your lunch and your next meeting? Or were you asking yourself questions like: is that true? Do I agree with this? Has this been my experience?”. And when you finished the book, did you immediately start another one from your queue? Or did you pause for a moment to sense and feel into how this book engaged you or made you feel?
That is what is meant by living our lives in “having mode” vs. “being mode”. The former seeks to passively yet hurriedly accumulate factoids and cultural property to then shove them on the already heavy and numerous shelves of our minds. The latter seeks to actively participate with the content, to question and inquire within, to use our psyche and imagination more fully. The former makes us mere receptacles of tidbits that may or may not come in handy. The latter stimulates new perspectives and provokes new questions, widens and enriches our ways of thinking, mobilizes our whole being, to form an alive relationship with the ideas presented, and a true dialogue that invites the participation of our whole human nature. In summary, the former is cold, mechanical, and dead. The latter is warm, organic, and very much alive and enlivening.
Which would you rather live in, dear reader? I know I would rather be in an orientation that increases my wisdom, sharpens my intellect, deepens my courage, and touches my very essence as a human being. And by the way, why do we call ourselves human “beings”? We certainly don’t say cat beings, flower beings, tree beings…could it be that hiding in our own very language is a fundamental hint about the orientation of humans when compared to their entire environment?
Living every day in “being” model is not only a true self-expression of life and what wants to be birthed in every moment through us, but it is also the very process of self-realization that is the goal of this life on earth. The other orientation of “having”? Well, as Fromm sums it, living that way turns us humans into super well informed “museum guides” of life instead 🙂
Now, why should you care? Well, if you are finding joy, purpose, fulfillment, and connection in most moments of your day, please disregard this entire article as you are probably already living that way. But if you are still reading and finding yourself pulled towards this new orientation, wanting to live in a more rapturous and purposeful life, then you are likely on a quest to change your orientation from good old having to the much more alive being. Keep walking your life, dear reader…more to come in future articles…