People are often for their interest in goods, luxury cars or clothes, and they are described as being for wanting these things. But I think that is to miss an emotional to the subject. People are attracted to status symbols because they want to feel valued. Why do we care so much about having status? Because from earliest childhood our self- is so dependent on the level of attention which we receive from other people. Penelope Leach is a leading child . We look for rewards in terms of , in terms of money, in terms of buying a nicer house. For most of us, the reward we really want is from whoever it is you are working for, and if you ask yourself, "Who am I working for? Who do I want to notice how well I am doing? Is it my ? Am I still trying to please my own father? Is it my mother? Is it the children whom I want still to see me as...?" You know. Um, it is sometimes quite interesting to work out for yourself, because you will find I think--everybody will always find that they are actually looking for somebody's attention and . You could say that there are two kinds of that we search for throughout our lives: romantic love and love from the world. Romantic love is familiar enough. It's the stuff of every novel, love song, and magazine article. But our search for love from the world is no less intense, but it tends to be spoken of in rather shameful, terms, as though this something only a or soul would be interested in--but far from it. Our search for status is linked to something as to us as light, heat, food, and water. Once we work out how central the need for love is, a lot of things become clearer, not least why we go shopping. We often shop in order to the world that we are , interesting people. A lot of is about status symbols, material objects whose use is psychological. They are objects that signal to the world that we are worthy of and respect.