Decluttering the Mind #066

Erich Fromm on Getting Rid of Our Wrong Mindset

Hello and welcome back to Every Dawn. My name is Andy, and I am a philosophy lecturer. In the past few episodes, we have been talking about the philosopher and writer Erich Fromm. Erich Fromm has this idea that we should distinguish between having and being, and we can live our lives, he says, our whole lives, in the mode of having where we try to have more and more stuff, or in the mode of being where we try to be more things, to have more properties on our person rather than things in the outside world.

One very important symptom of the wrong way of living today is clutter, which we all hate when one's home is full of stuff and things are lying everywhere. Sometimes, you cannot even enter a room without stepping on something, especially, you know, if you have children, and this tends to happen.

And even, you know, books—I have 3,000 books in my home. A big part of my living area is just taken up by books, and this is a problem because I sometimes ask myself will I ever read these 3,000 books again? Is there a need for having them? Because if you think about it, 3,000 books, since the year has roughly 300 days, I can read one book every day for about 8 to 10 years. Now I'm 60; in 10 years, I would be 70. Will I read one book a day for the rest of my life? Probably not.

So, who is going to ever read these books, and is there a reason for keeping them? Do they really make me happier, or are they just attracting dust, and I have to clean them and I have to sort them while in the end they are not giving me anything? Perhaps the space that I could get by throwing them out would be much more beneficial to my life.

And I think that we can think about these things in this way, but we can also just try to see it from this philosophy of Erich Fromm, who says that these books express a particular way of thinking—that I am trying to have knowledge, I'm trying to have these books by putting them up there, by imprisoning them in a way in my home, and trying to incorporate them into my body like I'm eating things. And then I have it because it's part of my body, but I cannot really do this with material things.

So these material things are always standing apart from me. They can be stolen, they can burn, they take up space, as I said, that makes me unhappy. And what I really want is not to have this book standing there. What I really want is to be the person who has been shaped by these books. I want to be the person who has the knowledge in these books, but I'm not going to be this person just by having this book standing there. I am going to be this person if I actually read the books, if I make them my own, if I take this knowledge up, if I process it, if I live it.

And then I will be this person. And this is often the case, especially, you know, because I'm a philosopher, so I'm someone who is required to read things and to have the knowledge because I have to communicate it to my students. I cannot be all these theories; I cannot embrace every single theory in philosophy. Sometimes I'm just required to know about it, and even if I don't like it, for example, even if it's not appropriate, I have to know about it. I have to pass it on to the students.

So, in this way, sometimes society is even making us have this having mindset and this cluttering mindset. Capitalism, of course, is another reason. Society, our Western societies, our Western economies, are based on the expectation that we will consume things, we will buy them, we will have them in our home, we will produce all this clutter, we will get fed up with them, will throw them away, and then we will buy new things. And this keeps the economy going. Of course, on the other hand, it destroys the planet, as we can see now, right?

It is the cause for microplastics, for global warming, for the piles of garbage that we export to poorer countries where they destroy the environment and they kill people. You can look up all these things on the internet, and all this is the consequence of this mode of having.

If we tried more to be and wouldn't accumulate all this clutter, all these things, then our environmental problems would be much less and much less urgent. A society of people who don't consume so much is much better for the environment, is much more resilient, is much more sustainable for the future.

So perhaps today, when you go out to your life, try to see where you are accumulating clutter in the hope that it will make you better just by having it. This is different from buying something that's necessary—nobody says that you should not have a home or that your home shouldn't be comfortable—we are talking about this additional clutter that you get just because you think that it makes you a better person in the same way like I am accumulating these books that I will never read again.

And perhaps in some small thing, first, we don't need to change our lives completely, but there are some small things we can try to be more than have. Try to identify what it is that we want to be, and instead of pursuing it by buying something, we can pursue it by trying to change the way we are. If I want to be more educated, why don't I read something on the internet where I don't need to buy it physically, and then I have it. I try to live it, I try to be this thing.

And in my relationship, perhaps instead of trying to own the other person, I can be more loving towards them. Instead of trying to own my children, I can be a better parent to them, and so on. You can see how this can be applied.

And perhaps we don't need all this clutter; perhaps we can try to declutter, to throw away a few things. There is this way, of course, there's this movement of decluttering, of Marie Kondo and all these other, you know, gods of decluttering. But the problem with this is that if you declutter without actually changing your mode of having, then you're just going to buy more after you have thrown away one batch. You will need something else, so this does not really help.

The basis for successful decluttering is to first change your mindset from the mindset of having to the mindset of being, where you don't need to have all these things.

Thank you, and if you want to know more about Fromm, watch this video, and otherwise, see you next time. Bye-bye.