Robert Franks, author of the best seller Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess, claims that what we sometimes call ‘retail therapy’ doesn’t work. Decades of rapidly increasing affluence and the ‘shop til you drop’ mentality has not made people any happier. We have convinced ourselves that the good life comes through accumulation; but experience teaches that it doesn’t. The fact is people are never happy when they are dwelling on themselves. All the research into happiness shows the opposite to be true. In other words, happiness comes when we lose ourselves. In those moments of euphoric forgetfulness, when we are no longer dwelling upon ourselves, we find what we can never grasp when we are consciously trying to do so.