‘We spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to make impressions that don’t last on people we don’t care about.’4 Smith himself admitted that, if we ever do ‘make it’ and become rich and successful, we often discover that we’re not actually any happier than when we began. We might even be less happy, more anxious, more bad-tempered and stressed. We realise we’ve been chasing an illusion, attempting to please an imaginary crowd of phantom spectators.
