July 26, 2007
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philosophy of gift giving
I believe that there is a fundamental difference between just buying something for someone and giving someone a great gift.
Just buying something for someone is basically just being a surrogate who does the act of paying for something that the person would likely have bought themselves if it was important enough to them and they can afford it and they had thought about it. So if in passing I mention that I’ve always wanted to read book X, and you give me book X, well then you’ve just bought book X for me. Had you not, I probably would have bought book X at some time in the future myself. It’s a nice thought for you to buy me book X, and I am grateful for it, but I don’t think it counts as a very cool gift.
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes people do extraordinarily selfless acts of buying something for someone else that are worthy of praise and for which I would be very grateful. If someone were to pay my way through law school for example, they’d be buying me a new education and I’d be extraordinarily grateful to them for the act if I chose to accept it, but it wouldn’t necessarily be something I would call a very great gift.
So, I think there are three ways in which you can buy something for someone and have the result actually be a great gift for that person. In other words there are three kinds of cool gifts.
The first, is a gift of the difficult to obtain. Here in someone expresses or somehow makes it apparent that they want something but it is a thing that they cannot easily obtain on their own and would be very unlikely to exert the effort to get on their own. For example if you wanted a book that is long out of print, or a famous one of a kind painting, or maybe a copy of an old game that is really really hard to find these days. You might want these things but have no real expectation that you will get them or have just never bothered to build up the willpower to exert the effort needed to get them. If someone gets you one of these things then it is quite likely that it will be an impressively cool gift.
Interestingly, in this first category of gifts, how cool the gift is depends not on how hard it would have been or how unlikely for the receiver to get the object being given, but rather on how much effort the giver goes through to get it for the receiver. e.g. an extremely wealthy person buys you an expensive car that you like with remarkable ease you may be grateful but you aren’t particularly impressed. Buying an expensive car for that rich person is no more difficult than buying a toy car is for you. In contrast, let’s say you have no mountain climbing skills but express a desire for snow from the top of Mount Everest, and your friend who has never climbed a mountain in his or her life, goes on a gigantic mission learning to climb, scales the mountain and gets some snow and brings it all the way back down for you at great risk to his or her own life. That’s a frickin cool gift, even if it is just snow.
Sometimes there’s some great confusion here because the receiver doesn’t necessarily know how much effort the giver went through to get them any particular gift and the giver very often doesn’t care to let the receiver know. Usually when people are buying gifts for people they care about they exert quite a surprising amount of unappreciated effort toward getting that gift, but it usually goes unknown because the receiver is unaware of how much trouble and energy goes into the very act of picking a good gift. But on the bright side any gift can be at least a little bit cool if you spent a lot of energy trying to pick it out for someone.
The second kind of extraordinary gift is the gift of something the person will appreciate but doesn’t know that they want. The unexpected gift. This is my personal favorite and the one I always strive for whenever possible. This is when you buy or create or transfer something to someone that they would likely never buy or think about buying or otherwise obtaining for themselves or that they might consider buying but is so low on their priority list that it is unlikely that they would ever get to purchasing it. These gifts aren’t necessarily expensive and don’t necessarily take a lot of effort to obtain, but they do express a great deal of thought and consideration and often reveal some knowledge of the person being gifted. How cool an unexpected gift is, is proportional to both how unexpected it is and how appreciated it is after the fact. Sometimes there is some confusion here too, as the person receiving the gift might not realize that they even want it or care about it until some time after they have been given the gift.
There is great risk in the act of giving unexpected gifts. And indeed if you choose to try and make all or most of your gifts unexpected gifts you might as well resign yourself to very often giving people gifts that they won’t want and won’t appreciate. Unlike categories one and three, an unexpected gift is a true gamble as it is not based on any certain knowledge of what the person wants or needs. Ironically an unexpected gift might even be a thing that the receiver needs or would enjoy but the receiver may not even realize it. The receiver may toss the thing out in trash right away thinking “what the heck is this? I didn’t ask for it” without even considering what special meaning or thought went into its selection. This is sad, but must be expected when one chooses to walk the path of the unexpected gift giving. All you can do is next strive to give a better more extraordinary and yet still unexpected gift the next time. You may well be known as a lousy gift giver all the way until you actually finally find that one extraordinary unexpected gift that makes all the rest worth while.
The third kind of cool gift is the least impressive but can at times be the most personal. This is the gift of presentation or packaging. That is, you take what is an expected not particularly hard to obtain item that you know before hand that the person wants or would appreciate and you give it to them, only you make the act of giving it to them unique by packaging it or presenting it in a way that stands out. You make the act of giving and the circumstances around which the gift is given as much a part of the gift as the item itself. In a way the memory of having received the gift is the real long term gift of which the actual item given is little more than a memento of the experience.
Often the ‘packaging’ includes some personal significance between the people between which the gift is being transmitted. The simplest examples of these kinds of gifts are like giving someone something with a special card that says something meaning ful or giving someone something on a special day of the year that has significance between them. More complicatedly you might go through some elaborate presentation to present something to someone, say fly them off to a deserted island somewhere or present something over national television. Alternatively the packaging might literally be the packaging. Say you might go through great effort to wrap a gift in personally drawn pictures or to carve a frame for a picture into an ornate pattern. Or the gift might contain little sub-gifts, small mementos of past shared experiences or references to inside jokes.
Really the third kind is the easiest. You can add a presentation layer that means something to almost any gift if you want to. It can require some degree of thought and consideration, especially if you want to make it really cool, but judging by the great success of the greeting card industry its pretty straightforward to add something personal to the presentation layer of any gift and everybody pretty much does strive to do a little bit of that. You can even give cash and make it a cool gift if you add an interesting enough presentation. How cool a gift presentation is depends on how personal and meaningful and unique the presentation is though, so although it is easy to add something it can be quite a difficult challenge to make that something amazing.
Anyway, if a gift I am considering giving does not at least strive to fall into one of these three categories, or I can’t think of anything that does, I’d really rather not give anything. I’d rather not just be the person who buys something for someone else. I want the gifts that I give to matter and be remembered. But that is far easier said than done.
