The Practice of Letting Go

This essay reviews Pasi Heikkurinen’s Degrowth: An Experience of Being Finite (Mayfly Books, 2024), which proposes a phenomenological foundation for degrowth as the practice of experiencing the limits of things-in-the-world. Across seven chapters, Heikkurinen draws on Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Whitehead to argue that the pervasive will-to-transform constitutes the primary obstacle to achieving degrowth. He advocates instead for releasement—a meditative practice of letting go that refrains from calculative, techno-solutionist thinking. This review traces the book’s key contributions, including its reconceptualization of technology as a social practice of enframing, its distinction between transformers and releasers, and its call for reforming rather than transforming. I connect these ideas to creative preservation—creation practices that preserve the relationships people value—and to an ethics of care, arguing that Heikkurinen’s releasers can be understood as caretakers who attend to the spatial and temporal needs of things as they unfold.