Once upon a time in the kingdom of France there lived a man named Diderot. He was a philosopher. For most of his life he lived in poverty. Figures.

He was mostly carrying out well in spite of his lack of means. But when Diderot was 52 years old his daughter was about to be married, but he could not afford to provide a dowry. The Empress of Russia, Catherine the Great, heard about it. Because of Diderot’s fame as a co-founder and editor of the French Encyclopédie, she offered to buy his library for $50,000 USD in 2015 dollars. Suddenly, Diderot had money to spare.

Shortly after this lucky sale, Diderot bought a new scarlet robe. The scarlet robe was very beautiful. It was so beautiful that Diderot immediately noticed how out of place it seemed when surrounded by the rest of his common possessions. There was no more coordination, no more unity, no more beauty between his robe and the rest of his items. Diderot soon bought new things to match the beauty of his robe.

He replaced his old rug with a new one from Damascus. He decorated his home with beautiful sculptures and a better kitchen table. He bought a new mirror to place above the mantle and his “straw chair was relegated to the antechamber by a leather chair.

But within three months, Diderot lost all his money. He said to himself: “I don’t cry, I don’t sigh, but every moment I say: Cursed be he who invented the art of putting a price on common material by tinting it scarlet. Cursed be the precious garment that I revere. Where is my old, my humble, my comfortable rag of common cloth?

“My friends, keep your old friends. My friends, fear the touch of wealth. Let my example teach you a lesson. Poverty has its freedoms; opulence has its obstacles.”

Fortunately, the Empress of Russia Catherine the Great had also offered him the job of personal librarian, which came with an annual salary to last the rest of his life. Diderot was saved. In 1769 he wrote an essay entitled “Regrets for my Old Dressing Gown, or A warning to those who have more taste than fortune”. Some years later, in 1773, he visited Russia to personally thank the Empress. After five months he returned to Paris and lived in relative simplicity, happiness, and productivity until he died in 1784 of a pulmonary embolism while having lunch.

The behavior he described has been called the Diderot Effect.

The Diderot Effect has nothing to do with dying while having lunch. Rather, it is primarily a social behavior related to consumer goods. It states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption which leads one to acquire more new things. As a result, we end up buying things that our previous selves never needed to feel happy or fulfilled.

For example, you buy a new car. You follow this up by purchasing all sorts of accessories to go inside it. You buy a tire pressure gauge, a charger for the cell phone, an extra umbrella, a first aid kit, a pocket knife, a flashlight, emergency blankets, and even a seatbelt cutting tool. At this point, you have already forgotten about your trusty old car of nearly 10 years during which you felt that none of those items were worth purchasing. Or you buy a CrossFit membership and soon you’re paying for foam rollers, knee sleeves, wrist wraps, and paleo meal plans. You buy a lazy boy and suddenly you’re questioning the layout of your entire living room. Those chairs? That coffee table? That rug? They all gotta go man.

The Diderot Effect is based on two ideas. First, goods purchased by consumers will align with one’s sense of identity and as a result goods and identity will complement one another. And second, the introduction of a new possession that deviates from the consumer’s current complementary goods can result in a process of spiraling consumption. The emotional driver is a sense that a purchase or gift creates dissatisfaction with existing possessions and environment, provoking a potentially spiraling pattern of consumption with negative environmental, psychological, and social impacts.

Another way of putting it is that we become what we buy and buy what we want to become. Consumerism, simply. Consumerism is a style of life directed towards “having” rather than “being” — because in fact having and being become one. Consumerism creates a “web of false and superficial gratifications”, wrote St. John Paul II. It leads to “attitudes and life styles… which are objectively improper and often damaging to [our] physical and spiritual health”, said the same Pope. It weakens the development and stability of personal relationships, said Pope Francis, prevents man’s growth as a human being (St Paul VI); prevents us from cherishing each thing and each moment and distorts family bonds (Pope Francis); leads us to shut others out (St Paul VI); and we become not the lords and masters but the slaves of material wealth (Pope Pius XII).

Consumerism brings many social ills as well.

Catholic social teaching is clear: “It is not wrong to want to live better, what is wrong is a style of life… which wants to have more, not in order to be more but in order to spend life in enjoyment as an end in itself.” (Pope St. John Paul II, 36). For a person who is concerned solely or primarily with possessing and enjoying – who can no longer subordinate his instincts, cannot be free.

Here are a number of suggestions for overcoming the Diderot Effect.

Reduce exposure. Nearly every habit is initiated by a trigger. A quick way to reduce the power of the Diderot Effect is to avoid the habit triggers that cause it in the first place. Unsubscribe from commercial emails. Meet friends at the park rather than the mall. Be productive at work.

Buy items that fit your current system. You don’t have to start from scratch each time you buy something new. When you purchase new clothes, look for items that work well with your current wardrobe. When you upgrade to new electronics, get things that play nicely with your current pieces so you can avoid buying new chargers, adapters, or cables.

Set self-imposed limits. Put limits for you to operate within. For example, put a cap on your ordinary expenses, and consult extraordinary expenses. Set a limit to social media time, which also limits your exposure to ads.

Buy One, Give One. Each time you make a new purchase, give something away. The idea is to prevent your number of items from growing. Said Maria Kondo, always be curating your life to include only the things that bring you joy.

Go one month without buying something new. Don’t allow yourself to buy any new items for one month. Instead of buying, rent. If you need a new shirt at this time, get it from ukay ukay. Constraint is the mother of resourcefulness.

Let go of wanting things. There is always something to upgrade to. Do you really need the specs of that new cellphone?

Cultivate good taste. Notice how the nouveau riche acquire so many things AND have little taste? A person with good taste tends to have a good handle on limits; exceeding those limits causes disgust, a powerful emotion. Good taste also brings intellectual conviction such that one doesn’t need to feel disgust — one just won’t buy, period. Good taste does not correlate with degrees or diplomas, is hard to acquire, and will require more treatment than is allowed in this piece.

And just because an acquisition will not involve any out-of-pocket money does not mean you can ignore these suggestions. We can still go astray by downloading hundreds of free ebooks and saving thousands of art photos, most of which we will never study or read. And it’s not just about downloading: some people love to UPLOAD photos of their food and vacations in order to acquire LIKES. I think likes are a novel form of wealth, which some can monetize even. But for most, LIKES are worthless. Again, it’s not wrong to have SOME of these.

The goal, I think, is not to reduce life to the fewest amount of things, but to fill it with the optimal amount of things. In Diderot’s words, “Let my example teach you a lesson. Poverty has its freedoms; opulence has its obstacles.”

Trivia: Diderot was funny. The entry he wrote for the Aguaxima plant goes: “Aguaxima, a plant growing in Brazil and on the islands of South America. This is all that we are told about it; and I would like to know for whom such descriptions are made. It cannot be for the natives of the countries concerned, who are likely to know more about the aguaxima than is contained in this description, and who do not need to learn that the aguaxima grows in their country. It is as if you said to a Frenchman that the pear tree is a tree that grows in France, in Germany, etc . It is not meant for us either, for what do we care that there is a tree in Brazil named aguaxima, if all we know about it is its name? What is the point of giving the name? It leaves the ignorant just as they were and teaches the rest of us nothing. If all the same I mention this plant here, along with several others that are described just as poorly, then it is out of consideration for certain readers who prefer to find nothing in a dictionary article or even to find something stupid than to find no article at all.”