On gifts

The culture of gift giving is a very fascinating thing: while the fundamental ideas are good, I keep getting a strong feeling that nowadays it is dominated by selfishness and self-entitlement: people are no longer pleasantly surprised by gifts but instead they implicitly expect and demand them. Nowhere is this more evident than in weddings, where I guess traditionally the concept was to help the new couple create their new home. But times change and these days couples that are getting married often already have been living together for a while and thus the need for cutlery and coffee machines should have been satisfied. But lo and behold, these days we have interactive gift lists with detailed descriptions and specifications for what is expected and acceptable to the couple. Or if you don't find anything from the list that you want to give, don't just wing it but instead give cold hard cash...

Somehow these types of things annoy me incredibly: I give gifts if I feel like giving them. If someone is demanding something from me, I don't typically give it to them merely on the grounds of them demanding it. And when friendships and relationships are in question, demanding material is in my opinion very much questionable.

Now, another funny aspect of the dominant demand-culture is that if you actually look at only the cash flow, it's a silly cycle of people sending money between themselves. While thinking about this topic, I browsed over some blogs and comments where people were giving out all types of guidelines about how much cash they typically give if they attend the wedding and how much if they don't attend. Then there are the people who motivate the discussion by noting that they do demand gifts and money because they have given gifts and money, which just results in this cycle. Money is good as you can shuffle it back and forth, but for some odd reason these same people tend to dislike it if they have given you a gift and you give it back to them when they have a celebration.

What I typically do during Christmas, for instance, is that if A gives me chocolate (C1) and B gives me chocolate (C2), I just act as a proxy and give A the C2 chocolate and B the C1 chocolate. If I get chocolate from more people, then I just hand them out in a random fashion back to the people. That way everyone is happy and I, not liking huge amounts of chocolate, don't get stuck with any useless stuff.

At this point I guess I should just say it out loud very clearly: I do not want or expect presents. If you must give me something, please donate to some good cause and tell me about it. It's a lot more useful than filling my already small apartment with all sorts of crap that I don't need. Alternatively if you don't want to help charitable foundations and still want to give me something as a present, please call me and I'll tell what equities you can purchase and transfer under my name to complement my existing investment portfolio.