"Having" Mode and "Being" Mode

The American essayist and biographer Agnes Repplier saw leisure as necessary for the completion not just of individuals but of civilizations. Leisure, she noted, “has a distinct and honorable place wherever nations are released from the pressure of their first rude needs, their first homely toil, and the rise of happier levels of grace and intellectual repose.” She believed that every investment and allowance should be made to support a leisure class—a fortunati—not so that its members could consume conspicuously, but so that they could create a lasting and worthy culture.

Lamenting the “labor-worship which is the prevalent superstition of our day,” Repplier saw the best and the brightest pursuing only practical courses of study and closing their minds to everything that did not relate to business or work. “It would appear,” she mused, that in fin-de-siècle America, one of the wealthiest societies in history, “we have no fortunati, that we are not yet rich enough to afford the greatest of all luxuries—leisure to cultivate and enjoy ‘the best that has been known and thought in the world.’” The overwork that Repplier saw taking root would grow only more entrenched in the ensuing decades. After World War II, critical theorist Erich Fromm observed that the postindustrial West’s “kind of ‘pursuit of happiness’ does not produce well-being,” because it is dominated by an attitude of “having” rather than “being.” Someone in the “having mode” who comes across a striking flower immediately wants to pick it, to possess it (or, in a digital context, to Instagram it or mint it as a nonfungible token), whereas someone in the “being mode” is able simply to enjoy the experience, free from the pangs of acquisitive desire.

The having mode drives people to acquire more and more stuff—property, profit, power, tokens of status. The being mode, by contrast, leads people “to share, to give, to sacrifice,” Fromm wrote. Whatever fulfillment you experience after purchasing some new thing, it is qualitatively different from what you would feel pursuing some intrinsically motivated activity in leisure.