Writing a few weeks ago in The Spectator, Toby Young slightly begrudged his wife’s decision to install a new kitchen in the Acton home they have shared for 15 years. As Toby explained, the original kitchen ‘had been done to quite a high standard in the style known as “Victoriana”, which meant William Morris wallpaper, antique-glass light shades and a small, dimly lit kitchen… This was the height of fashion in the late 1980s and will probably be bang-on trend again when we put the house back on the market in ten years’ time. But my efforts to persuade Caroline to wait out the fashion cycle came to nought.’

There’s nowt wrong with improving your home, and 30 years seems a reasonable lifespan for a kitchen, but Toby is being naively optimistic if he believes his expenses will be over once the kitchen is completed. They are just beginning. To misquote Walter in The Big Lebowski: ‘He is entering a world of pain. This is not ’Nam, this is home improvement. There are rules.’

Toby Young and his wife would be better off cancelling their kitchen restoration and taking up opioids or crack instead

Soon after the shiny new kitchen is installed, the rest of Toby’s home will look slightly dated by comparison. Hence the new kitchen will only act as a spur to further expenditure elsewhere, meaning Toby’s valiant attempts to pay down the mortgage will be endlessly thwarted by the acquisition of new carpets and sofas, a fancy shower-room and curtains. This will lead the family to depreciate their existing bedrooms, which are now noticeably dowdier than downstairs, meaning whole weekends will be lost to the discussion of thread counts and the endless comparison of barely distinguishable fabric samples. Toby and his wife would be better off cancelling their kitchen restoration and taking up opioids or crack instead. In the long term, they’ll find this no more addictive, far cheaper and considerably less frustrating: unlike decorators, drug dealers turn up on time.

For those interested in behavioural science, this compulsion to engage in endless home improvements has a name. It is called ‘the Diderot effect’, a coinage by the anthropologist Grant McCracken in honour of a 1772 essay by the eponymous French philosopher titled Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre – ‘Regrets over my old dressing gown’. This explains how a single act of extravagance – acquiring a scarlet silk robe to replace his old dressing gown – led its author into a never-ending spiral of consumption, since the sumptuous new robe put the shabbiness of his existing possessions into sharp relief. Out went his old straw chair, to be replaced with a Moroccan leather armchair; his desk was upgraded to a writing table; artworks were replaced with costlier prints and brass sculptures – all to restore a kind of equilibrium of bling within his home. ‘I was absolute master of my old dressing gown,’ Diderot writes, ‘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 are always under a strain.’

The Diderot effect is, I think, exacerbated by other compounding forces. One is the insane increase in property prices, which has meant spending £40,000 on a kitchen can be reframed not as an indulgence but as ‘an investment in your house’. When houses were residences rather than bank accounts, this did not apply. The most extreme form of this absurdity occurs in the upper reaches of the London property market, where fitters are hired to install a £120,000 kitchen to a perfect level of finish to help sell a house at its £7.5 million asking price, a practice known as ‘staging’. Once the sale is made, the new owners often decide they need a kitchen in a slightly different style. The original fitters are then told to hack out their handiwork of the previous month, which often ends up in a skip. Someone really needs to invent the Potemkin kitchen to solve this.

A second problem is the imposition of modernism and minimalism as a benchmark of taste, coupled with the never-ending elevation of standards in interior decor. I have been rewatching early 1980s episodes of Tales of the Unexpected on Sky and was fascinated to see peeling plasterwork and worn armchairs even in the homes of rich characters. We are simply much fussier than we were.

One tip: wherever possible buy a, say, Tudor or Edwardian house, which will still look good if piled full of crap. Do not buy a modernist house unless you are anally retentive. The minimalist aesthetic is a huge imposition on those who aspire to it, since a single book on a table is the most you are allowed, and even this must be carefully positioned to preserve the effect. When I was a child, people’s homes were interesting, since there was stuff all over the place; now they mostly look like identikit show homes. Since it is almost impossible to combine a minimalist aesthetic with having children, modern design also acts as a form of aesthetic contraception.

This illusion of perfection is magnified by property-porn television and magazines, which have a more pernicious role in creating unrealistic expectations than any other advertising form. I once asked a House and Garden journo: ‘Why do you always feature the homes of complete Luddites? You have kitchens with no microwaves, drawing rooms with no televisions or hi-fi equipment, bedrooms with no radios?’ ‘Oh no,’ she replied. ‘We take all those things out before we do the shoot.’ This staging leaves readers with a wholly fanciful, Marie Antoinette-ish view of what desirable homes look like.

William Morris, whose wallpaper is being stripped off the Young family’s walls as you read this, famously said: ‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.’ What he failed to spot is many things are not enduringly beautiful – they are merely fashionable. Are Belfast sinks OK? What’s the verdict on mock Victorian taps? Many industries exist not because they are useful but because they create markets where tastes change so rapidly that we must continually spend money and resources to maintain the homeostasis of status.

Such expenditure does not advance human progress: it is mostly positional and performative. Such signalling is hence a zero-sum game at best. Whole sectors of the economy have fallen victim to this peacock’s tail effect. Women’s clothing, home furnishings, weddings, decorating and something called ‘male grooming’. Oh, and Christmas. To be honest, I’ve always thought Scrooge was ahead of his time. But have a good one, anyway.