A few years ago I bought a motorbike I had wanted for a long time. The kind of thing you tell yourself is a marker, proof you got somewhere. I remember the ride home, and I remember the feeling maybe two weeks later, which was mostly nothing.

The motorbike was fine. It was more than fine but I was the same person on it. Whatever I thought I was buying, I had not bought it. The good feeling had all lived in the wanting, not the having.

I did not have a word for that flatness at the time. Later I found one, or rather a whole way of thinking about it, in an old book by a psychologist I had heard of and never read.

A quick note before I go further. I am a writer, not a psychologist or a clinician, so nothing here is advice about your mind or your life. This is one person reading philosophy and some research and thinking out loud, and the studies I mention are findings from particular groups of people, not settled laws about everyone.

Two ways of living, stated plainly

Erich Fromm was a German-American psychologist who spent a career on questions like the one my motorbike had quietly raised. In his 1976 book To Have or To Be?, he laid out an idea that has stayed with me. There are, he argued, two basic ways to live. One he called the having mode, where you locate yourself in what you own and control. The other he called the being mode.

His definition of the second is the part I keep returning to. Fromm wrote that “by being I refer to the mode of existence in which one neither has anything nor craves to have something, but is joyous, employs one’s faculties productively, is oned to the world.” His point is not that possessions are evil. Where you put your sense of who you are, he argued, decides almost everything about how a life feels from the inside.

The having mode, drawn honestly

The having mode is tempting because you can point at it. A house, a title, a motorbike, a business. It gives you a clean answer to the question of what you amount to, and the answer sits right there in the driveway.

The trouble comes when the thing is threatened. Fromm put it as a question: if I am what I have, and what I have is lost, then who am I?

I know the shape of that one. I once ran a small coffee business that was not working, and the numbers had been telling me so for a while. I held onto it well past the point the spreadsheet justified. If I am honest, the reason was not commercial. Shutting it meant admitting a loss, and the loss did not feel like losing money. It felt like losing a piece of who I was. I paid for that reluctance with roughly a year I could have spent otherwise.

That is the having mode doing its quiet damage. When your identity is fused to a thing, letting the thing go feels like letting go of yourself, so you hold on longer than makes any sense.

The being mode, drawn honestly

The being mode is not owning nothing. I still carry a leather wallet I made myself years ago. It has gone dark and thumb-shined with use, and I would not swap it for a new one. That is a possession, plainly. But my relationship to it is the opposite of the motorbike. I made it, I have used it every day, it has grown with me. It is closer to being than to having.

The other thing I have noticed is how wants recede. Moving back and forth between Ireland and Southeast Asia over the years, I have found it easier and easier to let things go, to travel light, to not need the pile-up I once thought was the point. There is a modern research parallel worth mentioning here. The Cornell psychologist Thomas Gilovich and colleagues have found that people tend to get more lasting satisfaction from experiences than from objects. Part of the reason, Gilovich has said, is that “your experiences are inherently less comparative, they’re less subject to and less undermined by invidious social comparisons.” An object invites the question of who has a better one. A memory mostly doesn’t.

The catch nobody mentions

The tidy version of Fromm is a trap I have fallen into myself. It is very easy to read him and decide the move is simply to own less, buy less, want less, and then congratulate yourself for being more.

Fromm saw this coming. He warned that “in the very attempt to suppress having and consuming, the person may be equally preoccupied with having and consuming.” The minimalist counting his few possessions with pride is still keeping score.

Choosing the anti-default is often just a different aisle in the same shop. Deciding to be the person who doesn’t chase the motorbike can become its own status object, its own thing to have. The test is not whether a path looks austere. It is whether it is actually yours, or whether you have swapped one borrowed script for another that flatters you more.

Where I actually land

I have not graduated from one mode to the other, and I have stopped expecting to. Most days I carry both. I can be content with the worn wallet and the light bag, and then catch myself an hour later measuring my life against someone else’s driveway. The being mode is not a summit you reach. It is a direction you keep having to choose, usually on ordinary mornings when no one is watching.

What I can report is small and specific. The letting-go has gotten easier over the years, not harder. The motorbike meant nothing within a week. The wallet still means something after a decade. I take that as a clue, and I keep the two modes in the same pocket.

If any of this stirs up something heavier than curiosity, about identity, loss, or where your sense of self has quietly attached itself, a good therapist is worth far more than an article.