Thoughts on “To Have or to Be” by Erich Fromm

As I mentioned in my IndieWeb Book Club post, I first read Fromm’s book more than 20 years ago. I was in my early high school years when I stumbled upon his work and was immediately intrigued by his way of looking at the world. The fact that he was not “just” a philosopher but also a psychologist and a sociologist meant his ideas felt more concrete and applicable in today’s world, even though his book was more than 30 years old at the time and is half a century old now. In reading To Have or to Be a second time, I was surprised by a couple of things. I remembered quite well the core thesis of the book, this tension between the two fundamental modes of existence, one predicated on the idea of possessing things, while the other is built on the concept of living and experiencing things without feeling the need to have them. It’s a way of looking at the world that felt right in my youth, and it still feels that way now, probably even more so considering the state of the world. But what I…