Spotify Wrapped, Performative Men, and Erich Fromm: How Does the Existential Mode of Having Influence Our Relationship With Culture and the World?
- Tomasz Pogorzelski
- Oct 27
- 7 min read
A Parable
The dreaded time of year is nigh. The guests are to arrive in a little over an hour. You begin to stew in your own thoughts and examine everything around you from ten different angles. Little by little, doubts start to spring into your mind about your surroundings. Does that show I am sophisticated enough? Is that too gaudy? Shouldn’t I have picked out something more original? The thoughts morph into a downward spiral. What if they consider me tacky? Will they think I have poor taste? Might my choices be seen as a lapse in aesthetic judgment? Might this compromise the likelihood of future visits? Your mind is now set. An express makeover is needed. You rush to the attic, thinking of the classical records left there by the previous owners of the house. You unearth and erratically scatter the ashes of Liszt and Wagner around. You arrange Holst and Debussy in the most visible places, thinking: “Now they’ll see how sophisticated I am!”. You sit back down and heave a sigh of relief. However, not all is yet solved. No! They will surely find it suspicious if this is all they see. One must diversify. You hurl yourself outside in a mad dash shopping spree to buy up as much niche musical stock as possible to impress your guests. You stuff your cart with connoisseur music to make sure that you are perceived as cultured, as someone whose taste level is something to aspire to. Before long, your ensemble is complete, the guests have arrived, and are now marveling at how unique and enlightened you are. You sink deep into your armchair and simultaneously into a feeling of unease. Suddenly, doubts start to arise as to whether this was all worth it. A sudden realisation lurches at you. What the guests are truly impressed with is an image of yourself. One that you have crafted not through experience (being) but through a consumeristic selection (having).
In 1976, “To have or to be?” was published. In this book, Erich Fromm takes it upon himself to explain and elaborate upon what he recognised as two distinct modes of existence – “having” and “being”. Now, these two states may initially be interpreted as simply representing attitudes of idealism, or valuing experience and spiritual aspects, versus materialism, or valuing material possessions and wealth above all else. While Fromm does examine his modes of existence the result of such attitudes – he criticises, for instance, the desire to accumulate possessions – having and being in his interpretations are forces which permeate aspects of life and the human condition beyond the strict dictionary definitions of those words. In writing this article, I was particularly inspired by Fromm’s reflections presented in the chapters “Learning” and “Reading” as they are, in my view, valuable in assessing the extent to which the mode of having dominates our relationship with cultural texts we engage with, and, subsequently, the social identity we create for ourselves.
Spotify Wrapped
As I alluded to in my introduction paragraph, I believe the common, especially in our generation, obsession with creating a curated identity to be admired and praised by others is an expression of the mode of having. I use the example of Spotify Wrapped mostly to underscore that the notion of having versus being is still relevant in the digital age. In his examination of the two modes in relation to reading, Fromm may have predicted the prevalent obsession with curated identities. What do I mean by this? The basic unit of a consumerist society is, as the name implies, the consumer. Whereas in previous economic systems, the worker was the basic unit and their role was to generate value through labour, the role of the consumer is to indulge in a wide selection of goods and subsequently create profits for corporations with a global scope.
Along with the shift in the nature of the individual in society came the shift in “building blocks” of one’s identity. This identity is now defined by consumption. Consumption of goods and services in the traditional sense, but also, and with increasing significance, the consumption of media. Fromm recognised this too in the context of reading. In the mode of being, this action should ideally be approached with a view to achieving “inner participation” – active engagement in understanding and, in fact (as would also be recognised by Umberto Eco) completing the contents of a literary work. The mode of having, however, is concerned with one goal only – the “acquisition” of a work’s plot. This acquisition is precisely what forms the basis for our fascination with such digital-cultural phenomena as Spotify Wrapped, Goodreads, and Letterboxd. This is, nevertheless, not a phenomenon that is entirely unique to the digital age. Can we not imagine an analogous situation to that of Spotify Wrapped, in which someone arranges ambitious tomes in their living room while hiding away thrillers and romance novels in the recesses of their home? We seek to collect cultural goods – music, literature, film to create a sort of reservoir, warehouse or, better yet, a display case which our fellow consumers may gawk at and judge as if it were the very essence of our being.
Performative Men (Identity Theft?)
It has already been established that in our modern world, identity is oftentimes shaped, or curated via the collection and display of cultural goods congruous with the mode of having. The internet-borne concept of a “performative man” is, in my view, representative of attitudes falling within this mode of having. It is important to notice that while the term “performative man” in itself is relatively recent, individuals representative of such attitudes have been immortalised through the use of pejorative terms even before the internet age – here we may look towards the use of the word “poser” (or “poseur”) by members of subcultures like punks or goths.
The persistence of such terms across time points to two further features of modern society: the desire for authenticity and disdain for the appropriation of the values of a given group via consumption. Young people are especially suspicious of performative displays of belonging. The band t-shirts of metalhead posers, and tote bags of performative males essentially act in very similar ways. They visibly signal identity, casting their respective wearers as fans of a given band or sensitive, contemplative individuals. If we recognise the described mechanisms as true, then we may be reasonably led to believe that engaging in consumerism, be it in the context of physical or cultural goods, with the purpose of projecting to the world an archetype or preset, is a form of identity theft.
Why do we build our identities on consumption?
Throughout this article, a rather critical, perhaps slightly mean-spirited view of the act of engaging in performative consumerism has been presented. This act is, whether we like it or not, something we all engage in to a certain extent. Human culture and social relations are, after all, largely based on performance. We strive to show the world only the best and most glamorous versions of ourselves. Moreover, streaming culture, by virtue of promoting engagement with digital and not physical media, has drastically altered our notion of cultural capital. In the pre-digital age a person’s cultural capital could be partially understood as the physical cultural goods they possessed: vinyl or CD records, books, DVDs. In the digital age, however, members of younger generations, save for edge cases of analogue purists, generally do not engage with physical media and, therefore, cannot consider it as a materialisation of their tastes. With such a lack of grounding of taste in physical reality comes quite naturally the desire to express it through other, more familiar means, including carefully curated playlists or Pinterest boards.
A performative attitude is, in and of itself, no defect of the individual. In the course of social development, one should begin to seek community and approval. What is potentially harmful is the consumerism added to such efforts, leading to an excessive attachment to the mode of having. When exactly does this become a cause for concern? I would argue that a specific point at which it does cannot be pinpointed, but when an individual experiences considerable anxiety or distress due to the disparity between their non-consumer, non-performative self and their consumer, performative self, the issue is evident. In a consumer society, the prevailing social system today, consumption is simply the most accessible form of expressing identity.
What can we do about this, knowing that such a system creates conditions for the proliferation of the toxic mode of having? Fromm imagined the revolutionary creation of a new social character, a new man, and a new society. While only time will tell whether such a moral triumph will ever materialise, it seems increasingly unlikely that it will transpire within our lifetimes. This revolution is now more than 50 years overdue, after all. While we wait for the creation of the new man, it would be wise to still critically examine the extent to which we are entrenched in consumerism and ponder the question “To have or to be?”
Page design: Pola Kurek
Bibliography
Camilla. “Between Marx and Freud: Erich Fromm Revisited • International Socialism.” International Socialism, 6 Jan. 2016, isj.org.uk/between-marx-and-freud-erich-fromm-revisited/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2025.
Fromm, Erich. To Have or to Be? New York, Harper & Row, 1976.
Gupta, Alisha Haridasani, and Nicole Stock. “How Do You Spot a “Performative” Male? Look for a Tote Bag.” The New York Times, 14 Aug. 2025, www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/style/performative-men.html. Accessed 13 Oct. 2025.
Umberto Eco. The Role of the Reader : Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. 1979. Milton Keynes, Lightning Source UK, 2011.
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