Gaining status. Luxury brands like Mercedes and Rolex don’t make much practical sense in terms of survival, right? In fact, spending lots of money buying a luxury car when a more common brand would do the trick seems counter to our survival, doesn’t it? Not when you consider the importance of status. Status, in any tribe, is a survival mechanism. I

Today, material goods are plentiful but their ability to reveal or enable social mobility is increasingly limited. There is no longer a dominant leisure class; in its place the aspirational class is rewriting the patterns of consumption while simultaneously disengaging in conventional material conspicuous consumption.