The advice was to stop chasing stuff and start chasing experiences. Stuff is shallow, things wear out, you can’t take them with you. Experiences shape who you are, create the memories worth keeping, become the stories you tell.

Erich Fromm published To Have or To Be? in 1976, twenty years before that reframe became cultural orthodoxy. His argument: the problem was never stuff. It was the orientation — what he called the having mode, the mode of relating to the world through acquiring and possessing. And the mode that makes accumulating things feel hollow will do exactly the same thing to experiences, because it doesn’t care what’s being had.

The Instagram era has been a thirty-year field test of that prediction. The results are in.

The Quick Version

Fromm’s To Have or To Be? (1976, his final major work) argued that Western civilization is structured around what he called the having mode: relating to the world through acquiring, possessing, and controlling. The alternative is the being mode: genuinely engaging, experiencing, expressing. The experience economy didn’t abandon the having mode. It extended it from objects to experiences. You don’t live a trip anymore — you have photos and a memory to show people. Fromm traced this orientation to the rise of private property and market economies in the 15th century, which is why it feels like the natural default rather than a choice. The arrival fallacy, documented decades later in positive psychology, confirms exactly what he predicted: reaching the goal produces brief relief, then the wanting relocates to the next target.

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The Structural Claim (Not the Moral One)

Fromm called the having mode “the fundamental illness of Western civilization.” That phrasing lands like a moral indictment — Western people are too materialistic, should know better. But that’s not what he meant.

The structural claim is different. The having mode isn’t a character flaw distributed unevenly among greedy individuals. It’s what a market economy produces in the people who grow up inside it. He traced it back to the 15th and 16th centuries: the rise of private property, market exchange, and the commodification of labor. When social life becomes organized around ownership and exchange, having stops feeling like one option among others. It starts feeling like the way consciousness just works.

That’s what makes it so hard to detect. You’re not choosing the having mode. You’re swimming in it.

Byung-Chul Han made an adjacent argument about the achievement society — that neoliberal capitalism produces subjects who exploit themselves from the inside, mistaking compulsion for freedom. Fromm’s structural claim is the same move: the problem isn’t individual weakness. It’s the orientation the system generates, which people then reproduce without noticing.

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What the Having Mode Actually Does

The having mode (Fromm, To Have or To Be?, 1976) is an orientation toward existence organized around acquiring, possessing, and consuming. In the having mode, a person doesn’t experience something — they have an experience. They don’t love someone; they have a partner. They don’t think an idea; they have knowledge. The mode turns every encounter with the world into an act of appropriation, which is why the satisfaction it generates is brief: once something is had, it no longer fulfills the appetite that drove the having.

The examples Fromm uses are precise. In the having mode, you don’t attend a lecture to engage with ideas — you attend to have the information, have the credential, have something to cite later. You don’t enter a relationship to know another person — you have a partner, which you can reference and display. You don’t travel to encounter the unfamiliar — you have the trip as a memory and a set of photographs, which can be shared as evidence that you went.

The mode doesn’t discriminate between objects and experiences. Both get consumed, checked off, filed away in the archive of the self.

	Having Mode	Being Mode
Experience	Collects it, documents it, reports on it	Enters it, is changed by it
Other people	Has a partner, friend, network	Knows and is known by another person
Learning	Acquires knowledge to hold and display	Thinks, questions, is genuinely curious
Feeling during	Anticipation, then neutral or flat	Absorbed, present
Feeling after	Mild dissatisfaction, ready for next	Something that lingers
Structural endpoint	None — the wanting relocates	Possible, but not automatic

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The Experience Economy Didn’t Break the Pattern

The late-1990s cultural reframe — stop buying stuff, buy experiences instead — rested on the idea that experiences engage people more deeply than possessions. That’s partially true. Experiences are more personal, more memorable, more tied to identity.

But the engagement Fromm describes in the being mode isn’t what the experience economy delivers. What it sells is better content for the having mode. More meaningful stuff to acquire, document, and reference.

The travel photographer who visits fourteen countries completing a project isn’t living those trips in the being mode, necessarily. The person who checks “see the Northern Lights” off a bucket list and immediately researches the next item isn’t there either. The Foucauldian self-optimization regime runs on the same structure: turning every practice into an asset to have, a score to achieve, a metric that confirms you did it right.

Augustine’s analysis of desire touches this from the theological angle — an appetite that doesn’t close, seeking rest it can’t find in finite objects. Fromm’s analysis is secular and structural, but the phenomenology is the same. You had the trip. You had the milestone. You had the relationship, the achievement, the sunset. The appetite didn’t close. That’s not a failure of the specific experience. It’s the mode at work.

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The Arrival Fallacy Is Just the Prediction, Confirmed

Positive psychology arrived at Fromm’s conclusion through a different route.

The arrival fallacy — a term coined by Harvard researcher Tal Ben-Shahar — describes the false belief that reaching a significant goal will produce lasting satisfaction. Research consistently finds the opposite: reaching a goal produces brief relief, sometimes not even that, sometimes mostly a moment of flatness. Then the wanting relocates to the next target.

Athletes who trained for years toward a championship. Executives who worked toward the promotion. People who pursued the relationship, the credential, the income threshold — the thing that was supposed to make it real. They arrive. They feel something, briefly. Within weeks, the appetite has moved on.

Fromm’s framework explains why. The arrival fallacy isn’t a quirk of goal-setting psychology. It’s the having mode operating exactly as designed. The mode doesn’t generate satisfaction from having — it generates appetite. The goal was always just a target, not an endpoint. Once had, it stops functioning as the thing that would finally be enough. The mode needs a new target immediately.

Aristotle noted something structurally parallel in his distinction between hedonic pleasure and eudaimonia. Pleasure fades because it doesn’t accumulate; you keep needing more. Fromm’s having mode is the civilizational institutionalization of that same trap — not just individual pleasure-seeking, but a whole way of organizing consciousness around acquisition.

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What the Being Mode Actually Requires

This is the part Fromm is careful about, and the part most people get wrong.

The being mode is not a retreat. Not a sabbatical. Not a meditation app subscription or a digital detox weekend or a solo backpacking trip. Those experiences can be engaged in either mode — had, documented, reported on, or genuinely entered. The mode isn’t determined by what you’re doing. It’s determined by how you’re present in it.

Fromm’s examples of the being mode are deliberately ordinary: genuinely listening to someone without preparing your response. Engaging with an idea because you’re curious about it rather than because you’ll get credit for knowing it. Making something because the making itself matters rather than the product you end up with.

You don’t get to the being mode by having better experiences. You get there by changing how you’re present in whatever’s happening.

Simone Weil’s concept of attention is almost a synonym for what Fromm means here — genuine attention as a full orientation of the person toward something outside the self, rather than a performance of engagement. Which is harder than it sounds when culture has wired nearly every social experience to function as content.

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Three Places to Apply Pressure

Fromm doesn’t offer a program. But his framework points at several pressure points worth examining.

1. Notice the post-experience impulse. After something meaningful — a trip, a conversation that went deep, an evening that worked — observe the first impulse. Is it to integrate what happened, or to document and report it? The reflex to immediately photograph, post, or narrate is the having mode surfacing. Not always wrong. Worth noticing.

2. Try something without the output. Read something you won’t discuss, recommend, or reference. Cook a meal you won’t photograph. Have a conversation you won’t summarize. The discomfort in doing this is itself informative — it surfaces how much of what felt like engagement was actually having. If you can’t do it at all, that’s data.

3. Notice when anticipation beats arrival. Fromm observed that the having mode often produces more excitement before an experience than during it. The trip in anticipation is richer than the trip being lived. If you consistently notice more satisfaction in the planning than in the being there, the mode has already consumed the experience before you arrived.

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What This Doesn’t Solve

Fromm’s structural diagnosis has structural implications. Individual practices can shift orientation at the margins. They don’t dissolve the system that produces the having mode as the default.

He was explicit about this in To Have or To Be?. The person who achieves genuine being-mode engagement within a having-mode society has found a personal workaround for a civilizational structure. That’s worth something. It doesn’t substitute for the larger critique.

There are real limits to how cleanly the analysis applies. Not all documentation is self-estrangement. Not all goal-setting is pathological. The person who photographs a trip because they love photography is using a different mode than the person photographing to prove they went. The mode isn’t visible from the outside — and Fromm would say it’s often not fully visible from the inside either.

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The experience economy told us we were solving the problem that stuff created. Fromm’s argument — made in 1976, before the solution had even been proposed — was that the problem was never stuff. Swapping things for experiences left the orientation intact and gave it better material to work with.

What’s available in the being mode isn’t a more meaningful version of the same project. It’s a different project entirely: engaging with what’s present rather than accumulating what was.

That requires less planning and more presence. Which is harder to sell, and considerably harder to have.

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This post draws on Fromm’s framework as a lens for reflection, not as a prescription for self-improvement. The structural critique he offers operates at a scale beyond individual adjustment. If persistent emptiness or goal-dissatisfaction is significantly affecting your life, please consider exploring that with a therapist.