The Diderot Effect - a useful insight

I was absolute master of my old dressing gown, but I have become a slave to my new one … Beware of the contamination of sudden wealth. The poor man may take his ease without thinking of appearances, but the rich man is always under a strain.

Denis Diderot (1713-1784, French philosopher) lived most of his life in poverty, spending most of his time writing and editing encyclopaedias. In 1766, he described the Diderot effect in his essay "Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown". This is still very potent today.

He never received much money for his work and struggled financially until one day in 1766. Catherine the Great (empress of Russia) loved his encyclopaedias and heard he was not able to pay for his daughter's wedding.

She decided to help him out so she bought out his entire library for the equivalent of $150k. Suddenly, Diderot had more money than he knew what to do with. The first thing he did was he went out and bought himself a red scarlet dressing gown.

But then, he was filled with dissatisfaction once he realised his possessions did not match the elegance and style of his new dressing gown. He decided to buy more and more stuff, until eventually plunging into debt.

He replaced his old straw chair, for example, with an armchair covered in Moroccan leather; his old desk was replaced with an expensive new writing table; his formerly beloved prints were replaced with more costly prints, and so on.

This phenomenon of one purchase leading to another and then another (driven by dissatisfaction) is now called the Diderot effect.

In McCracken's usage, a Diderot unity is a group of objects that are considered to be culturally complementary, in relation to one another. McCracken describes that a consumer will strive towards unity in appearance and representation of one's social role.

Additional references:

• McCracken, Grant Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1988 ISBN 0-253-31526-3; pp. 118–129
• Schor, Juliet B. "The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need" Harper Perennial; 1st HarperPerennial Ed Pub. 1999 edition. ISBN 0-06-097758-2 ISBN 978-0060977580
• Schor, Juliet B. ‘Learning Diderot’s Lesson: Stopping the Upward Creep of Desire,’ in Tim Jackson (ed), Sustainable Consumption (2005)
• Bits of the story are extracted from Ali Abdaal's summary here

Note: Art generated by the author specifically for this article, with AI and special prompts.