For a long time I have been thinking whether there is a relation between what one spends in his life and his identity. What I mean is, do what anyone spends money on shows who is he or she. Does it show if he is a male or a female? Does it show whether he is an Arab or westerner? Does it show the social class? So I have kept a log of everything I spend money on over a period of two weeks in order to find out the relation that may be linking expenditures and identity. I have come up with several results.
Firstly, expenditures have a very deep relation with the social class. If we looked to my table of expenditures over two weeks, we would find that most of the money spent is on luxurious things such as food and beverages. When I put food and beverages under the term "luxurious", I don't mean that it is a luxury that one can live without it. However what I noticed is that I spend around 150-200 Egyptian pounds only on food outside home and that has a very high indication to the difference between social classes. Most of the people from low or middle social class do not spend all that money on food outside home. They can not afford such amount of money to spend over outside food. They prefer to eat inside their houses which would be much lesser. Also there is another point, this amount of money I spend weekly on food and beverages can feed a whole family from the lower class for a month. That is true. There are families who have never heard of the types of I eat. Those families live on bread, cheese, and beans. Food for them is not a luxury item. It is more what makes them live.
Another thing that shows the difference between social classes is what I spend on entertainment. For example, I spend 25-50 L.E on cinemas weekly. I don't think there is any person from a lower social class would spend such amount of money on cinemas weekly; moreover, there are people who only go to the cinemas on special occasions such as the feast.