The Diderot Effect:  Do You Own Your Possessions, Or Do They Own You?

How Our Wealth is destroying our Lives and our Planet & How you can do a Gentle Swedish Death Clean

This essay is personal. My wife and I live in a large country home with 4 bathrooms [I grew up with one in a small bungalow]. That was OK when we had our kids and then our 2 grandmothers living with us – but the kids left years ago and the grandmothers left last month. Now what do we do? It makes no sense for 2 people to live in such a large home, but moving is so difficult… why? Because have accumulated so much stuff! We need to purge! We need to do what the Swedes call a “Gentle Death Clean”! [It’s a book by M. Magnusson –  The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning] Maybe you do too? And for those youngsters reading this the need to have less stuff is, if anything, more urgent for you in this time of Ecosystem collapse as less stuff = less destruction.

The benefit of death cleaning to your loved ones who won’t have to do it for you is fairly straightforward. But what about the happiness and enjoyment on your end? Psychology and sociology offer some interesting reasons why going through our possessions, paring down and cleaning out really can be helpful — and why it really might be prudent to not wait too long before jumping on the trend.

We all know this equation:                 Environmental destruction = population x consumption               and these facts:

The average American home size has grown from 1,000 square feet to 2,500 square feet.

Personal storage generates more than $24 billion in revenue each year in USA.

We consume twice as many material goods today as we did 50 years ago.

…and yet we usually point the finger at others as we happily live a lifestyle which, if all people enjoyed it, would require 5 planet Earths. We live in Canada and are thus a significant part of the problem because Canada, according to this chart, emits the 2^nd most emissions per capita in the world and has the 10^th total emissions of any country [data from elsewhere]. Why is that I, knowing that and trying hard to reduce my consumption [roof solar, electric car, geothermal heating], still trip over my belongings and use vast quantities of energy to maintain my lifestyle? Blame the Diderot effect, our genetic programming to always want more, advertising but most importantly my weak will.  Let’s begin to figure out how you & I can free ourselves from our possessions by learning about the Diderot effect.

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 obstacle. – Denis Diderot

Have you ever had this happen? You buy new hand towels for your bathroom, and pretty soon you’re buying new sofas for the living room. Because you buy new hand towels and realize you need a new bath carpet, and then you need to repaint the bathroom, and then you need to repaint the hallway, and then you need to redo the furniture inside the living room.  Before you know it, it has led to this spiral of consumerism that can spiral out of control sometimes.

Believe it or not, there is a name for this. It’s called the Diderot Effect. Named after a famous French philosopher of the Enlightenment, Diderot, who, among other things wrote this famous essay, entitled ‘Regrets on Parting with My Old Dressing Gown.’ And inside this essay he talks about the experience where he received a new robe as a gift. A nice, red robe. And he loved it.

He loved wearing it, it was nicer than anything he had. But then he started to realize that nothing fit in with it. None of his other clothes were as nice. So he got nicer clothes to match his gown. And then he had to get nicer seats to match his nicer clothes. And then he had to get nicer furniture to match his nicer seats. It led to this out of control spending that he really regretted.

I liked what Diderot said about his dressing gown. He said, ‘I was the absolute master of my old robe. I have become the slave of my new one.’ This happens so much in our life. Who wants to be a slave to possessions and things? Not me! Not you!

 This is clearly a problem for those who have more than they need. But is there an even deeper desire we have for stuff that is programmed into our desire to be higher up on the social pecking order and also to reduce stress so we are happy? Perhaps it is not our intellect or knowledge which is the problem, but our unfilled emotional needs. This is what a famous minimalist Joshua Becker suggests may be some of the reasons we buy more stuff than we need:

1. We believe possessions will make us secure. Our logic goes like this: if owning some material possessions brings us security (a roof, clothing, reliable transportation), owning excess will surely result in even more security. But after meeting our most basic needs, the actual security derived from physical possessions is much less stable than we believe. They all perish, spoil, or fade. And they can disappear faster than we realize.

What you can do: Only buy stuff that meets your basic needs – including the need for beauty.

2.We think stuff will make us happy. Nobody would ever admit they search for happiness in material possessions—we all just live like they do. As a result, we pursue bigger houses, faster cars, cooler technology and trendier fashion—all the while hoping we will become happier because of it. Unfortunately, the actual happiness derived from excess physical possessions is temporal at best.

What you can do: When you have the urge to buy stuff to make you happier, find another way to be happy.

3. We are more susceptible to advertising than we believe. Some studies indicate we see 5,000 advertisements every day. Every ad tells the same story: Your life will be better if you buy what we are selling. We hear this message so many times and from so many angles, we begin to subtly believe it. This is a call to realize their messaging affects us more than we realize.

What you can do: Reduce your exposure to advertising to a minimum.

4. We are hoping to impress other people. In a wealthy society, envy quickly becomes a driving force for economic activity. Conspicuous consumption is a phrase invented years and years ago—but it’s never been more prevalent than today. Once all of our basic needs have been met, consumption must become about something more than needs. Unfortunately, it too often becomes an opportunity to display our wealth, our importance and our financial success with the world.

What you can do:  Work on being humble and content while you do even better work and treat others even better than before.

5. We are jealous of people who own more. Comparison appears to be a natural state of our humanity. We notice what other people are buying, wearing, and driving. Our society encourages these comparisons. And all too often, we buy stuff we don’t need just because people in our friendship circles have done the same. But if you need nice things to impress your friends, you have the wrong friends.

What you can do: If you’re jealous and/or comparing yourself to others find out why you are and work to stop it.

6. We are trying to compensate for our deficiencies. We mistakenly look for confidence in the clothes we wear or the car we drive. We seek to recover from loss, loneliness, or heartache by purchasing unnecessary items. And we seek to satisfy our discontent with material things. But these pursuits will never fully satisfy our deficiencies. Most of the time, they just keep us from ever even addressing them.

What you can do: Admit to your deficiencies and work on them.

7. We are more selfish than we like to admit. It can be difficult to admit that the human spirit is hardwired toward selfishness and greed, but history makes a strong case for us. We seek to grow the size of our personal kingdom by accumulating more things. This has been accomplished throughout history by force, coercion, dishonesty, and warfare. Unfortunately, selfishness continues to surface in our world and our lives even today.

What you can do: Realize that your selfishness is reducing your chances of being content.

Being content = possibility of living a sustainable life

So, what more can we do to be truly content and thus live a sustainable life? Don’t Just Declutter, De-own!

• Give possessions that you rarely use to friends & family & neighbours desperately need them.
• Get out of debt – debt means we are not free to make the best choices for us.
• Instead of organizing our things into boxes, plastic bins, or extra closets give it away.
• Re-evaluate your life on a regular basis. When something is no longer part of how you live remove it and only keep what’s truly most important to us and that is used often.
• Ask yourself, as I am doing: “Is my stuff preventing me from doing what I really want to do? Is my stuff taking up valuable hours of my day that I could better using being with people I want to be with and doing activities I love to do?”

The act of getting rid of stuff from our home accomplishes many of those purposes. It is not a temporary solution that must be repeated. It is an action of permanence—once an item has been removed, it is removed completely. Whether we re-sell our possessions, donate them to charity, or give them to a friend, they are immediately put to use by those who need them.

Removing possessions begins to turn back our desire for more as we find freedom, happiness, and abundance in owning less.

If you’re struggling with how to get rid of stuff, you can:

1. Challenge yourself to remove the unneeded things in your home.
2. Rid yourself of the extra weight in a permanent manner.
3. Carry a trash bag from room-to-room.
4. See how big of a donation pile you can make.
5. Eliminate debt by selling what you no longer need.

It doesn’t matter so much how you remove them, as long as you do. Once you & I have done this then, and only then, do we stand a chance of saving the World from the pollution and destruction that we humans are inflicting upon Mother Earth.

Imagine a life with less. Less stuff, less clutter, less stress, less debt, less discontent.  – R. Nicodemus