This kinda happened without any planning, but I found out one of my colleagues at work had the same birthday as me. We were pretty close for co-workers and shared a lot of the same sense of humor and interests in things. Somehow, we hit on a tradition where I would just buy something for myself that I wanted, and bring it to work and thank him for it, and he'd do the same. He got new boots he liked, and I got a cool pair of expensive sunglasses I wanted. This went on for a few years. It was hilarious. I think this is one of your funniest videos yet. Thanks for what you do.
Now see, that's surprisingly actually possibly a good gift. It's not the gift you buy for yourself, it's the permission you give each other to stop feeling guilty and buy that thing you've been wanting. That won't apply to everyone of course, but some of us have trouble with that.
This is like the "treat yourself" tradition Tom and Donna had in Parks & Rec. They'd pick a day once a year when they would just indulge their desires, buying fancy clothes or jewelry or going to expensive spas. Maybe all we really need is friends who encourage our happiness 🙂
But the cool thing is to discover all the other different possible sillinesses. About gifting the gift-economy: I forgot the name of some island tribes.. they would not directly trade with each other, too dangerous, too much chance one party overpowering the other, they would leave "gifts" on the beach.. the other would take it, and leave stuff they would consider comparable.. and that would go on forever. (as in until European colonists drove them out)
Some anthropology, to summarise its subject as "silly little humans". I was learning a different kind of anthropology at the university, as one of the subjects when I studied philosophy and logic.
My parents always say I'm hard to buy gifts for because I don't want anything. I always respond that that makes me VERY EASY to buy gifts for, because they can get me NOTHING and I'll be happy. That's what I think they should have done for Kenny Malone in the podcast episode: the one thing we know for sure about Kenny Malone is that he thinks Christmas gifts are bad, so getting him nothing would show that we understand him and know what he values.
@@Deipnosophist_the_Gastronomer My parents would wrap it in the largest box with a set of boxes inside leading to a note that explains they got him nothing & they'd think that was HILARIOUS.
"Sometimes you have 40 peoples to buy for." What? Ok, we're clearly in completely different cultures here. I have to buy for 3 people and I have already no idea what to buy.
I came to this conclusion way back 15 years ago. I decided that in obligatory gift giving situations (family Christmas gatherings) that I would make food for everyone. A common one I did was bake baklava and give it to everyone to take home. This accomplishes several things- it’s more impressive than the effort that I spent time on it bc it seems like it’s really difficult to make (but it’s not), it’s something that everyone in my family likes so there’s economy in time to decide, it’s relatively inexpensive, and it gets used (bc they eat it) so it’s not wasteful.
@@LimeyLassen when my bf asked me what to get me for my birthday, i asked him to bake me a lime pie. If it was someone who regularly baked (like me), it wouldn't really be the same. Just a one evening job. But since he didn't bake, it was special. I was impressed that he actually put in the effort and made it for me. And then he also had some stories to tell about how he conquered these challenges, like cracking and separating eggs. Lime pie isn't even available in stores here, so it's also pretty cool to eat.
@@LimeyLassen The mention of hand-knitted sweaters is a little funny because of the concept of the "sweater curse", a superstition that gifting a handmade sweater to a significant other will inevitably lead to the relationship failing in short order. There is a wikipedia article about this but the tldr is that hand-knitting an entire sweater is extremely time consuming and likely involves a lot of introspection by the knitter so if the recipient's enthusiasm for the gift doesn't match the knitter's expectations, it can cause new problems or cause one or both parties to realize existing problems in the relationship leading to a breakup. Handmade baked goods are much easier so less disappointment even if the recipient doesn't like them!
I was really tickled at Tolkien for coining a word needed for societies with semi-voluntary gift giving. The kind of gift you generally got was a "mathom." A mathom is a gift that is useless or useless to you that you really can't get rid of except as a regift. He goes on to tie this into a tongue in cheek just so story about the invention of the museum (or, in the Shire -- Mathom House).
Ceremonial gift-giving is not necessarily something that required the invention of a new word. In Malinowski's anthropological study of the polynesian islands around the turn of the 20th century he identified what was called a 'kularing', which served a very similar purpose.
My wife and I buy our own gifts and then pretend it was given. She has given me a new Kayak, a new osciliscope, MSVC compiler, a 3D printer ... and she always know exactly what I want :) She is awesome ;)
You are so spot on about the 'being the _____ guy' trope. Mine wasnt star wars, but socks. One time I was one of the groomsmen for a friend of mines wedding. The gift he gave the groomsmen were the cool mint green/blue argyle socks that went with the full ensemble, so I'd wear them from time to time since the socks meant a lot to me and reminded me of my friend. That somehow translated into be being a "socks guy" and now I get argyle and rick and morty socks every year....
Flashback to an elementary school $5 gift exchange where I thought the only plausible gift (and all I wanted) was chocolate/candy, and I got a Star Wars extended universe novel instead.
My mom spent 8 bucks on a mug for me and I do not use mugs and she is my mom, so she knows I do not use mugs. I know it was 8 bucks because the price was on it.
My partner and I have stopped giving each other holiday specific gifts (yes, including birthdays) years ago. We just do nice things for each other throughout the year and that's good enough. We get weird looks and awkward convos when discussing this with other people though. I do appreciate my mom who, since my childhood, has asked for a specific gift list. My family and I won't be surprised, but then we'll actually get what we want. She's also been buying us more 'experiences' (tickets to events or plays, etc.) which can often be better than a gift too, with less potential waste. I don't mind not being blown away by a surprising perfect gift if it means way less trash.
Same here. Live across the pond tho. Kinda common practice in my social circle, its sorta faux pas to buy random crap. My BF is British, when I came over to his family Christmas these past holidays, there was a lot more awkward trash. Must be an English speaking country thing. The entire Christmas culture shabang definitely exists but has this weird artificial Americanised vibe over here of companies trying to sell you on garbage. Same with black Friday; over here they turn it into "black week", "black month" (not kidding), then have a 10 percent discount on their overpriced low end products (compared to prices online). I go look at it every year to get a good laugh and also be depressed about how capitalism is ruining our culture and the cool traditions we once had.
The gift on the podcast of their own book was clearly the best one. She might not have said it, but I’m sure she went home thinking about how great the exposure for her book was on that episode. Plus, she earned $0.10 on royalties for that purchase.
This is why I love my secret santa exchange with my friends, where all of the gifts are so intimately picked out for comedy value that you're basically paying $20 to make them laugh hysterically rather than picking something generic from a list based on a small thing they like. For example, one year I got "The Monolith", an 8 foot tall construction of lumber and aluminum foil that was the most unwieldy abomination, but we were all crying laughing for 10 minutes as it was presented to me.
Sorry if this is a downer, but if youre all essentially getting each other gag gifts what do you do after you're done laugh and go home? Do you still keep it and have it take up space in your home the rest of the year?
@@anniee5487 depends on the gift. The airtag, football player prayer candle, sleep aid, and funny T-Shirts can get lots of use past just the day itself. But for those items that are a one-off laugh, I think of it like paying $20 for drinks for a night out with friends or a putt-putt place or whatever else. Those are also just one-off things you spend money on then go home after with nothing to show for, but the experience and laughter with friends is worth it. And yeah some of them take up space, but when you stumble upon them with the rest of the junk that's a lot less funny, you get residual laughs, especially when those friends are around.
@anniee5487 gag gifts, like almost all ephemera, are unceremoniously disposed of when their usefulness has been exhausted. If it sends someone into a laughing fit like that, I'd argue that it's pretty useful and justifies its own existence. The same cannot be reliably said about some random plastic thing from Spencer's.
As a "generic man" the only gift I want for Christmas, New Years, birthday, whatever gift giving occasion... is socks. Seriously, just buy me socks. I don't want mall ninja crap, tacti-cool beard trimmers, scented anything, I just want goddamn socks. I don't care what they look like, they can have floral patterns, squares, triangles, tartan, they can be with cats, dogs, capybaras, blue, green, black, gray, I don't care, buy me socks. I don't care what thickness they are, if they're thick winter ones I'll put them on immediately, if they're light summer ones, I can wait till summer. Just buy me socks.
Wool socks also for men in the north. I am literally wearing the pair I got last year because I asked for one. Great gift! She got to knit them, I get to wear them, the equilibrium has been maintained.
When I was about 12 I decided that I'd make it easy for my aunts and uncles, and when they asked me what to get I'd say socks. To *one* uncle, I said that I'd like to get the kind of white cotton socks which work well for gym classes. I ended up getting *31* pairs of white socks, and two pairs of dress socks which had color to them. 🙂
huge factor missing in the gift value equation is the anxiety and energy spent on figuring out what gift to give and worrying about whether it'll be good and what reaction it'll have sure some people enjoy that, but for others this vastly outweighs any value that could be gained from gifts and shaming people for not giving or not "putting in enough effort" is exactly the cause of the problem
In my family we kind of make the energy and effort the gift. (Also we all kind of hate surprises) My mom wanted cocktail glasses this year and my dad wanted a nice wooden cutting board. And yes, those items are the gift, but also me doing the research and comparison shopping instead of them doing it is part of the gift too.
@@MissaBrevisthis is how me and my husband do gifting I think now that you mention it. We both are very particular people. Its hard to buy gifts for this reason BUT it’s perfect for effort as the gift. We tell eachother the thing or concept we need or want and can truly trust that the other is just as neurotic as ourselves. My husband knows when I say “those the best long johns you can buy” that I’m not joking and I checked. And he didn’t have to do any of the labor of that joy. We both value our time over almost anything so the appreciation is high both ways. Scientifically proven that sandwiches made by anybody other than yourself taste better to you. We all just have to find what feels like a gift to us and to our loved ones. 💓
@@chlobes that's an excellent point, I see what you mean. In my case I love my parents dearly but they're settled, financially stable people and much more likely to help me out than the reverse in our day to day lives, so holiday gifts are a rare opportunity for me to concretely show my love rather than an obligation - but when I stop and think about it, of course my experience is unfortunately far from universal.
If you know someone well enough you know their likes and dislikes, so there shouldn't really be any great effort or anxiety involved in 'figuring out' what to get that person. And if you don't know them closely why would you even be giving a gift.
The ten thousand dollar gift is acceptable because it automatically comes without the expectation of anything in return, or at least without the expectation of anything that can bought from a store for that amount of money. Such a large gift is almost always really a. A form of generational wealth transfer b. An act of charity c. A bribe d. Some combination of the above 😊
the internet having ruined Christmas is something that's frustrated me for years and it is so vindicating to hear it discussed in such detail. Thank you Dr. Collier
I may be very Northern European™ but I do believe that if you're giving a gift, either it has to be either: 1) on the recipient's public wishlist 2) liquid assets. Gift cards and cash fit in envelopes, people. Nobody ever got mad about recieving a "here's 100€, buy yourself something nice." Also, all social subsidies programs that don't give out cash are fundamentally paternalistic and disrespectful of the autonomy of poor people.
Agree to a large extent. The issue with cash is that I need to give you a cash gift in return. So what's the point? Gift giving among adults is stupid. Children should receive gifts of course.
Even a gift card can be money poorly spent though, unless it's extremely generic like a Visa card. "Oh, this Amazon gift card can buy me almost anything, but actually I need gas in my car."
Is prioritising housing over freely usable money a paternalistic approach? Is prioritising spending money on food instead of substance abuse such? Sadly I see these people willing to risk their life for the purpose of getting their heads messed up for a day every time I leave my more affluent neighbourhood. Here in the Northern Europe it can take just one night of such behaviour to die of it, at least during the winter.
I think another reason why Christmas gifts are bad is that we ask people for their Christmas Lists. I mean, you even did it when you asked what would make us jump for joy. But what really makes you jump for joy is the surprise of getting the perfect gift that you never even considered. And when we spend more time making christmas lists, we end up spending more time trying to figure out what we want than the people who get us the gift spend, which leads to a loss in happiness.
The way I've personally tried to solve this problem is "give a gift that has use value" and that's pretty much the only marker. I just want someone to get a thing they're going to use. Easier for kids when I know their hobbies and I can get them something they can't get themselves (because they don't have money and would have to ask their parents), but for adults I look for things that have use value. A nice towel, consumables like tea are always killer because if its good tea hey they'll drink it every once in a while and then it's gone and they'll enjoy it, cool socks (be it comfy or just high quality) and always make sure it's a small amount of thing. A single nice towel, 8 cups of tea worth of tea, 1 pair of socks, etc. So far I've had a lot of success with this type of gift, though not perfect success. But if we're going to keep giving gifts, I feel like this is a good heuristic to go off of. General gift that person would kind of like and also use.
Some of my go tos: high end peppercorns with a grinder, same for salt. High quality olive oil and/or vinegar. Fancy pastas. Basically, things I know the person likes to eat, but on the luxury end where they wouldn’t splurge on it for themselves.
You put into words what I've been feeling for so long. There's a wood toy and a book that have been sitting still wrapped on my shelf for more than one christmas. The only person who got me gifts I end up using is my sister, who got me socks with my cats faces on them and glasses that are slightly larger than the ones I used before. It also took me 10 years to finally get my family to understand that I wasn't into Star Wars anymore
Every year my step-mom buys me 3-5 shirts with slogans on them, “but first, coffee” kind of stuff. I know she gets them cheap as dirt in Amazon and they’re usually very ugly and fall apart quickly. Like gee thanks for the slave-made garbage
This is why if you're close with family, asking is usually a better idea! That way you also get to know who they are more and bond together ❤️ or cash if u don't want that 🤣
For an example of a great Christmas present I got as an adult, several years ago my sister-in-law scrolled through my Pinterest pages and found a pin I’d saved to my stuff I love board that was a cool scarf I saw on Etsy that looked like a fox curled up on its tail. She crocheted me her own version of it. I was stunned and so excited when I opened it. I still wear it all the time.
I steal everything I gift to other people so the store gets paid from the insurance and if the person recieving the 2 lbs of brown rice doesn't like it and throws it away nothing is lost . 100 % efficiency achieved .
The insurance pays and passed on the cost to the retailer, which passes it on to everyone who buys anything from the store including very poor people who are actually negatively affected by small changes in the price of something like brown rice.
@@edwardkuenzi5751 joke, noun a: something said or done to provoke laughter especially : a brief oral narrative with a climactic humorous twist b(1) : the humorous or ridiculous element in something (2) : an instance of jesting
@edwardkuenzi5751 it depends on a store. On chain stores it doesn't affect much, but don't shoplift on local stores. That's not really great for anyone
My family stopped doing Christmas gifts a few years back and the holidays have been so much more fun. When we stopped, I was still living at home while I got through college, and that meant I was an adult with just a bed room, so I had no space for random stuff I didn't need or wasn't exactly the object I needed. Aside from making it hard to shop for me, actually it made receiving gifts stressful. Now I either needed to decline to dispose of it or find a spot for it, and the only socially acceptable one took up valuable space I didn't have. My sister in law did that thing at their wedding where they showered everyone in tchotchkes commemorating the day, which is a much more important day for them than me, I'm just a guest there. But it's also stuff I mostly still have because it's got my name on it, literally, and it's faux pas to throw it out. And that's annoying: I didn't need it, I was perfectly happy just showing up and having food and company. I guess in the end I'm just saying that a bad gift can literally have negative value, and good gifts don't happen on a calendar schedule.
Personally, for a long time I've thought waiting to do (almost obligatory) gift giving until christmas was silly. I much prefer the idea of if I happen to see something while I'm doing whatever shopping that makes a certain person come to mind so strongly that I know I have to get this thing for them, and give it to them the next time I see them. I think little random gifts throughout the year like that can mean more because it's not done out of a feeling of social obligation. I also think of it as sporadic potential pick-me-ups because we all have stuff going on generally and it's nice to know that someone's reminded of you by something.
I find all sorts of gift-giving in general to be stressful. When I was a kid, it was good, and it was able to introduce me to new things-I was a kid! Most things were new to me. Civilization IV was, in terms of the amount of enjoyment I got, one of the best gifts ever. Now, though, I doubt anything could come close to that, because... I already know what I like. And now I also need to reciprocate, which is incredibly stressful.
A video specifically for me, what a lovely christmas gift :) I thought I hated gifts for a long time, but I've learned that giving on my own terms when I can actually afford to put thought into it massively changes the playing field for me, and I've been able to give some damn good gifts in the last year or two. My current favorite is a bottle of authentic balsamic vinegar that I got for my dad, which is not something anyone else would have gotten for him, including himself.
in my late teens i started telling people i wanted nothing. in my 20s i told people "if you really want to get me what i want for christmas, you'll get me nothing" and people really did stop giving me stuff. i have a rule that i don't get other people gifts for special calendar days. if there's a great gift for them at christmas time, i'll buy it and hold onto it until after christmas is over and there's no gift-giving calendar day. if you get them a gift when there's no expectation for you to, then it's more real.
Loved what you said bout federal financial assistance programs. Its so crazy that they’re inefficient because of some fucked up concept of “deserving” it or not??? The economics of “deserving” is real and lowkey insane lmao 😭😭
I'm not an expert, but does the government actually pay $1 for $1 in SNAP? It's possible to get a lot of store gift cards on sale because *breakage* is factored into their value. I would have assumed (hoped?) that governments only pay for the SNAP dollars that are actually spent.
With Medicaid medicare and such, I get an OTC card benefit , but I've noticed over time they won't approve the cheapest most cost effective generic brands, only the most expensive name brands , (like $16 for 4 bandaid brand hydrocolloid bandages vs $12 for 8 generic). They also have their "own" brand catalog. I think it's engineered that way, they pay little over cost but only approve the most expensive items so your insurance benefits run out faster costing them less. Acting like kickbacks but legal.. That's my conspiracy theory of the day.
@@petevenuti7355 Yeah, it's pretty insidious. I can't remember if it was John Oliver, Hasan Minhaj or Rebecca Watson who did a breakdown on "we only cover the brand name" medication-IIRC it's a deal between the pharmaceutical companies and the insurance providers.
a government could also set up factories to produce the drugs themselves as all profits a company selling drugs to the government makes is profit that if the factory were run by the government would just end up back in the budget but yeah because of pharmaceutical company lobbying, the free market doctrine of this era and a host of other reasons its normally just outsourced to whatever company lobbies the most. pharma is one of the more explicit sectors in terms of corporate-government corruption
Look up the paper "Cash vs. Food? How Does Food Stamp Eligibility Affect Food Stamp Enrollment and Food and Health Outcomes of SSI Recipients?". It's available for free. The study found that when states would offer a cash benefit for food and people would take that in lieu of SNAP, food insecurity and negative health outcomes associated with lacking food increased. It is not unreasonable to assume that people who have trouble living independently without assistance can also have a tendency to have trouble self-regulating their assistance. That can be true without any moral judgement, blame, or moralizing about the recipient of aid.
As a man who can't grow beard at all, receiving a beard trimming kit wouldn't be just a bad gift, it would be a personal attack 😅. But more seriously, December stresses me out, the anxiety of choosing gifts and the cost... I'd rather we just all put a little bit of money to get an extra good feast on Christmas eve and that's it.
Why not just ask those close to you what sort of things they'd like as a gift? If you're given a choice of a few items then you know you'll be giving them a gift that's actually appreciated, while there's still a little surprise factor for them because they won't know WHICH of the things they listed they'll be getting. Best liked 'unsolicited' gift I ever gave to someone was a mate of mine who casually mentioned in conversation he needed a new winter jumper because his old one was wearing out. I made a mental note, paid attention to the style and colours of the jumpers he liked to wear, then got him a nice lambswool one that fitted his taste. He wasn't expecting it but it was exactly what he wanted!
It looks to me like the problem isn’t that Christmas gifts are being given, it’s that the threshold for “knows person enough to get them a gift” is WAY too low. If it were only a handful of people, the gifts could be much better.
@@martinwhitaker5096just take her out for a fancy meal and you both have a nice evening? Or let her choose something she wants for which you then pay. Does she like clothes shopping for instance? In which case she could pick an outfit (if it's affordable of course) and that's your gift to her. (substitute whatever else if she's not into clothes.)
I may be a weird person, but I grew up with “wasted gifts” and they became a weird connection years later. I remember my grandmother never used her foot bath with massage and heater, but I did after I realized no one used it and decided to use it. That goes for weird unopened cds, exercise equipment (bands no one used), or the weird jewelry box I later used to store screws for projects. My grandpa bought my grandma a stereo photograph kit and the only thing that survived when I was around where the cards. I ended up using eBay to find a stereoscope and it was a weird moment. I think the gift was decontextualized from the original experience and gained something new (due to the novelty of a no longer used technology). I like those things, they will be the leftovers of society much like the leftovers we sometimes find in the current day. The Atari ET game survived longer than most games because in terms of archival because it was the gift left in its packaging and tossed but became the subject of a lot of people trying to find the landfill with ER games. I think sometimes there is an underestimation of the knock on effects of bad gifts. They may not be realized right away, but I think a lot of ET kid owners got satisfaction over the years as their most hated video game had a weird story that a lot of people wanted to hear. People and their quirks are more interesting than ways that can be tracked by asking a person their opinion. I think a central part of gift giving is the understanding that sometimes it will find a weird new home (island of misfit toys).
we're not against economics, however, economics is usually regarded as a social science because it's ultimately about human behavior. --signed, a psychologist
sometimes i feel the soft science distinction is silly in the first place. i mean science is about developing theories that can make predictions and that results and studies can be replicated. this is pretty true for economics and also sociology. so do we draw the line between soft and hard at equations? the law of supply and demand is a very rough law that breaks down yet it also describes something real and in theory very measurable-the relationship between scarcity and decision making. I mean this is such a foundational principle in economics and one that is unchanging and very physical. and because of its connection to economics, i question the distinction with sociology, too. i mean psychology is fundamental to individual human behavior, yet sociology reveals that humans in groups demonstrate profound emergent behaviors that end up feeding back into human behavior. It connects the economic theory that people will make decisions based on their means and the reality of human behavior as imposed by our feeble minds as studied in psychology. and not to mention this entire video and the issues here are very strongly connected to social norms. i mean this concept of gifts and gift giving is a social construct. giving money instead of a gift of equivalent market value is tacky because of society. it is so fascinating that we have gift giving in the first place and the question of why do we have it why do we have those norms. anyway i’m not arguing i’m just a computer scientist ranting about linguistics bottled into a rant about the social understanding of certain phrases like soft science vs hard science and how the differentiation is stupid and yet it exists and i know what you’re talking about and i’m always going to live with the fact that i have this hang up about soft science vs hard science. you think i could get a free session to explain why i care so much? thanks
@@hasan7275 Yeah, my understanding from my experience in undergrad is that most social scientists aren't much a fan of the soft/hard science distinction for the reasons you put forward, and tend to prefer a distinction between natural and social sciences which more accurately describes the divide.
My Swedish family (I'm American) all buy and wrap one gift that we would like. 1) We put them on table. 2) We sit around the table. 3) 1 person roles a dice. -) If it's a 6 you pick a gift on the table to open. -) If it's a 1 you steal a gift. 4) We move counterclockwise around the table until all the gifts are gone. The gift giving becomes secondary to the tradition but when someone does get a good gift it has a story behind it. It adds a fun version of the trading element. It also allows people to spend significantly less while still keeping in the holiday spirit.
I've told people to stop buying me gifts because (a) I am a grown up and if I want something I can either afford to buy it for myself, or it's too expensive for anyone I know to buy it as a gift; (ii) most gifts I receive I don't want; and (iii) getting rid of stuff I don't want (even giving it to charity or selling on eBay) makes me feel bad.
had the same philosophy about gifts, but last time my girlfriend bought me a Johny Walker Blue Ribbon, which is a really good whiskey and it cost more than 200 dollars, so I accepted that and I was glad that I was able to taste what the relatively rich drink every day.
This is precisely my position, with the addition of (iv) I'm autistic and ADHD and extremely picky about *everything* so being able to figure out my taste is effectively impossible. I spend hours researching purchases and to expect someone else to do that for me (or even with me) is untenable.
@@lunasophia9002 Hm, isn't some big puzzle good as a surprise gift for such a person? Maybe I am wrong because ADHD means you will not have enough patience and attention span to solve it...
This attitude is kind of sad really. Gift giving can be an wonderful part of maintaining community and family. But our focus on cost seems to take a lot of the joy away and you end up in this situation where you decide nothings "worth" it.
If they like puzzles it's amazing, if they don't it's a waste. The point is that they are super specific about their interests and hobbies. Just bc some people with ADHD and/or autism are drawn to puzzles or riddles, doesn't mean everybody with autism would have that same interest. Even if they would be into puzzles, they would likely own some already and be quite specifc about the ones they actually enjoy. @@ozymandiasultor9480
In my social circle, we reached the same conclusion years ago. Now, we only get gifts for the kids, and our dearest loved ones. We get to spend more time enjoying each other's company, instead of stressing over holiday shopping. I would also like to add that IMO secret santa is one of the worst forms of "holiday waste". It usually involves cheap gifts, selected with little care or knowledge. Most of the stuff goes straight into the trash. But some people actually enjoy the silliness, despite the egregious waste.
i once did secret santa in my friend group and it was successful. the key is to communicate the budget and your personal no-no's. and the overall expectations should be communicated as well (are we doing specifically silly cheap things or are we doing something more serious? how do we feel about gifting surprise boxes? is it okay to buy holidays related stuff?). the point of secret santa is to put in the effort for one person instead of several people. so if someone gifted you 'waste' then they just didn't care. and in corporate settings that's gonna be more likely unfortunately. this video demonstrated really well that even if you collectively try hard, it's still shaky and there's still gonna be some disappointment. but secret santa can be a good middle ground for everyone. even if i receive something worse than i gifted, i'm still gonna be happy that i put the effort in but without all the stress surrounding christmas shopping. the bar really is low.
The secret to gift giving is buying those $15 galaxy lamps at Walmart. Every time there is a secret santa thing going on, people end up fighting over the damn lamp.
Thank you for making this video. Now I can succinctly describe why I really hate gift giving. I'm definitely the person who just buys what they want and who's hard to buy gifts for. And I hate trying to figure out what to buy others -- so some of my gifts have been a bit paternalistic. It's so true that all gifts are just to try and reach the heights of giving gifts to kids.
This is why I just make my gifts every year, durable hand-made things. This year I'm making stone mortar and pestle sets. Carved from literal rocks I pull from the river.
i also lean towards handmade gifts, but they can indeed be very tricky. Some people just don't appreciate the effort that goes into them. Even in this video, she was talking about how these handmade sweaters used to be found in thrift shops. I have made a couple of sweaters and i would value them at least 1000€. Even the yarn itself is more than 100€, while my time is invaluable to me. And some people do indeed just throw this stuff away. I think gifting a mortar and pestle is quite tricky as well, even for someone who might use them. I'm living in a small apartment and i don't have enough cabinet cabinet space even for a frying pan. I literally have to use a chair to get to my pan because i couldn't find an accessible storage location for it. Mortar and pestle often go near the bottom of the priority list for kitchen utensils, so i hope you'll make sure to give it only to people who have a lot of space in their kitchens or to people who really love and value handmade things.
@@Desimere Maybe consider that Tanya isn't giving the mortar and pestle to you, so your apartment size doesn't matter, and that they probably know the person they're giving them to.
The really horrible thing is children having to buy gifts for their parents. Every year my brother and I would buy my dad an engraved pen until I heard my dad say that The Shadows were a decent band and then, suddenly, all his gifts were Shadows albums, which is awkward because they weren't making new albums so it was always the same songs. Basically my dad can't express an interest in anything or that becomes all his gifts. Like last month when my nephews bought him a Billy Connolly book and he just added it to his stack of Billy Connolly books (before that it was Spike Milligan)
for parents I assume it's the thought that counts. But jesus, why don't you ask him what he wants?? why do you have to guess? that's what I do for my mom
So good! I even love your reaction to the pro-gifter’s arguments - he is not extrapolating to the practice of gift giving as a whole, he has instead contrived a very deliberately “outlier” gift-giving event (spending no doubt far more time and thought on this one than any others that he gives routinely) to argue his point, misrepresenting the practice of Christmastime gift-giving. I do have a coworker who surprises our small night shift crew every year with the most unbelievably thoughtful gifts. Like ancient Roman coins for a history buff and a portrait of Tecumseh for our guy who is obsessed with him. (that second gift, if I’m being cold as ice, I would never say is a “good gift” - as you said, decor is HIGHLY personal and wall space is limited. There is so little chance of another person’s choice being what you would ideally prefer for your shared living space). That said, I’m the only woman on the shift, with main interests of history and science, but I got a stack of end-cap pop books on gardening. 🤷♀️ I like gardening, but I had to downsize to a small apartment - so, no garden, and I also used to have a spare room as a “library” and now I don’t, so I just have an assload of books I have no space for. So there’s an example of a THOUGHTFUL gift, but showing how he couldn’t necessarily know the circumstances that make this gift not only impractical but a bit of a burden (sitting in a teetering stack that gives me anxiety, waiting to be sold). And to your point, books which interest me, I have hundreds saved in wish lists, and most of the books I’d care to actually read that are gardening-adjacent, I already own. (soil culture, mycelium layer, creating vernal pools - things I can’t do in an apartment but which interest me aspirationally, and much like any other non-fiction read might). The point is, it was thoughtful yes, and I appreciated it. But, it did sorta have the net effect of making me feel yet again “othered” as a woman working among all men, treated as not being able to like “boy things” (which means anything smart or cool 🤷♀️). They got cool history stuff, I got pop culture picture books on gardening. His gifts to them excelled partly bc he thought he would like them himself, but for me, he bought for me “as a woman,” and these books all definitely felt like end-cap Barnes & Noble “gifts for her” purchases. It’s a bummer that every night we’re avidly discussing all of the same things and yet I alone am given gifts which are simpler and woman-centric. I wasn’t angry, it just happened to be a bummer, a very small blip of “same ole same ole” finding out how men can still tend to have a reductive view of me as a woman even after sharing hundreds of hours of conversation that show our interests are staggeringly similar.
I am sorry for that experience, and I can see myself struggling to not make the same mistake. Especially if I don’t know you that well, even if I know your interest, it takes actual effort to look past the marketing. Like I might know you like history, but that’s pretty wide topic. Meanwhile these ads said that all women love soft towels. I also know you definitely like history and science more than gardening, but there are so many gardening books in the “For Her” -section, and it fits both your interests and what the marketing is telling us. Of course the sexism happens when I subconsciously interpret the “For Her” -section to mean the rest of the store is Not for you. Or that the existence of product with feminine branding means the others are not good fit for women. Little mental effort helps to offset this, but it still makes buying gifts harder. Sometimes I catch myself thinking: “I know she would like this, but is it a good gift?” As in: it doesn’t correspond to my mental image of a gift for a woman. Which is mostly formed by advertising.
@@catcatcatcatcatcatcatcatcatca Yeah, unfortunately that’s all kinda sexist. If someone knows what I like but still chooses to opt for something reductive to my gender. And to be clear, they do know what kinds of history are my favorite. These are people I’ve shared hundreds of hours of excited conversation with. And while I wouldn’t EXPECT a staggeringly thoughtful gift, it’s the juxtaposition of the thought put into the gifts for men that is hurtful, and the fact that he got everyone else something he would like, very literally othering me. As in..you are saying it would take effort and I am saying this person does a great job of putting in the effort, except with me bc I am a woman. It’s just a bummer. And if someone knows someone, at all, but then decides to reduce them to a stereotype to simplify the act of giving a gift, that’s an especially “don’t bother” situation bc frankly, you’re making someone feel bad instead of good. How does that even check a box as to the intent of gift-giving? It really isn’t a kind gesture at all, just a way to avoid being a pariah for leaving out the women in your life completely. He knows what I like, and additionally, not to be a “I’m not like the other girls,” but he truly does know that the typical things marketed to women don’t interest me. But (and the point is that this kind of thing happens OFTEN with men) the subconscious predilection to minimize me as a woman won out at the end of the day. Kinda like how they know I’m a film buff and also that some of my favorite movies are war and history films, but they talk to each other about Napoleon assuming I am not interested in it at all. It’s my favorite director (which they know) and it’s history lol. They just still see me as “girl who likes girl stuff” for no reason other than sexism. 🤷♀️
@@catcatcatcatcatcatcatcatcatcaI just buy gifts for whichever person as an individual, not based on whether it's deemed 'appropriate' in terms of man/woman. This guideline has served me well.
Gender role training is stubbornly hard to break from. Just the same, I get beard-kit-like stuff from women in my life who know me a lot better than that. We're cultural conformation machines, often even when we know the heuristic is bad. You have to consciously fight it. This is also evidence that real gifts can have moderately or even strongly negative value. 30% off the top is not even close to the worst case scenario.
Perspective is important. As a child, I was fortunate enough to interview my great grandmother who was born in 1912. I still have the recording. She was one of 9 children, and they lived in a 2 room (not two bedroom) apartment. Her oldest siblings had to drop out of school in 8th grade to get jobs. Anyway. She talked about how spoiled everyone is today (using the word "spendthrift" as an insult). She said she remembered her favorite Christmas present. An orange. I guess my point is that to someone who is poor, socks can be an amazing Christmas present. I saw a video where most homeless shelters say their number one need in winter is quality socks.
The internet didn't ruin gift giving to me, it was ruined for me long before the internet. Family and the social mandatory need to make you get everyone a gift regardless whether you can afford it or have the time for it instead of getting someone a gift because I genuinely think they'll like a thing is why gift giving was ruined for me
Every so often I think "I could use a beard grooming kit" and then I remember that I own two of them, both of which I used once, lost an essential piece immediately, and shoved into the back of the cabinet.
I have a master's in economics and know we disagree on a lot of economics. This was very well done and thought out. I want to quibble mildly with your equation. You put time and effort of the gift giver as value to add to the gift, those are actually costs that are added to the gift which make them more expensive not more valuable. What you are missing is the value the gift giver gets in the act of researching and presenting a good gift. There is non-intrinsic value both for the gift giver and receiver and for their relationship which generally is worth more than the time effort and physical value of the gift itself. Also, you're right, I only get gifts for my kids and significant others and make all of my family just give me money so I can get gifts for my kids and put their names on them because I'm a dirty economist who doesn't trust them to not buy a bunch of junk to fill my house with. Great job!
So the extra expense, if added correctly to the cost of the gift, increases its value? But, if the extra expense is wasted on a horrible gift, then the value is decreased maybe even to the point of a deficit?
Like any good (econo)physicist, she used some shorthand and threw out negligible terms. The inequality is properly: v_percieved > v_actual With all terms existing on both sides and the fundamental issue being that the age of internet has effectively zeroed out the terms on the LHS-how many times have you received a garbage gift and thought, "Come on, dad, how hard would it have been to pull up my Pinterest board and then order something from Amazon?" Yet the _RHS_ terms-the actual mental effort of acquiring the gifts, hasn't _actually_ gone down because of how much more difficult it is to find items that are truly novel to the recipient.
@@liamwhalen The search costs of buying a gift are always costs, Even when you are buying it for yourself. So the internet in that way, by reducing search costs has created a ton of value. But that is only looking at the cost side of the ledger, some people really like shopping, many people like shopping for gifts even more, especially if you feel you gave a good gift this creates even more value for the giver which is often ignored, as is the value of the relationship that is built and maintained through the giving of gifts.
@@GSBarlev Is this a supply and demand aspect of the value? The demand for novel gifts increases with the associated amount of supply? Can they be considered independent of each other? The cost of the demand increases due to the scarcity of determining a truly unique gift? Whereas the supply may or may not increase the cost depending on the individual nature of the demand? For example, figuring out that someone really loves fig newtons but will not tell anyone about it due to social shaming and quietly gifting them some has a high demand novelty cost but a low supply cost.
@@liamwhalen In this case it is not really a supply-and-demand thing, which is weird because it's basically always a supply-and-demand thing. For supply and demand, you are trying to find an equilibrium price and quantity. Gift-giving is basically between two individuals and the receiver by definition has no say. What it is more, is, the giver deciding what amount of Time+Effort+Money will create the most satisfaction for the giver. In that calculation the giver will attempt to value the relationship which is enhanced by the gift and attempt to gauge the reaction of the receiver, note the giver does not have to be right, the receiver may hate the gift but if the giver perceives that they liked it then they will gain a benefit from that. But all of this happens after the fact, the gift giver is making a calculation in their head beforehand of how awesome this particular gift is going to be and only finds out what the utility is after the fact.
Food stamps don't disappear at the end of the month. I knew someone on them, and when he finally didn't need them anymore, he had something like $750 left over in his account. He spent every penny after his benefits expired. Therefore, no, food stamps are waste-free.
I went through a phase of being extremely cynical about christmas gifts, but I've mellowed on it in the past few years. While I agree with a lot of what you say, and I generally fall into the camp of believing we should all buy a lot less junk in general, I also think that the whole practice of exchanging gifts is just as much a ritual as it is an economics formula about value. And rituals are usually never rational, or efficient, or practical. Like when ancient cultures burnt the animals they'd hunted to offer them up to the gods - nobody was fed from that practice, all the effort put into that hunt was in a literal sense completely wasted. But the ritual mattered in a way that transcended whether the value of those animal carcasses was maximized. It created bonds between people - and feelings of connection between those people and the world around them - that are hard to quantify. That's how I think about gift-giving, now. I tell my family I don't want any gifts, just to spend time with them. They always buy me something anyway. And I think that's sweet, because it's just an attempt by them to be close to me by sharing this ritual. So even if it's some dumb beard kit that I'm just going to re-sell on the internet in January, the act still means something and the connection it creates is still real.
The question is whether it's a ritual that people actually want, or one that people are scared to get rid of because they think they'll be outcasts if they stop participating. You even told your family "I don't need this ritual" and they still do it. Maybe it brings value to them, but maybe they are worried that, despite your words to the contrary, you would actually reject them if they stopped. My mother *despises* Christmas shopping, and tells me so every year, but she still got me gifts for many years after I grew up and moved out, because she thought that I would be disappointed if one year she didn't get me anything. No one wants to disappoint their child. I truly didn't care, and said so many times, but it took years for me to convince her. No value was created for either of us by the ritual. She was just trapped in it. Social rituals tend to have this toxic quality -- they stick around long after no one actually wants them.
@just_some_commenter I'm sad that traditions can have this drawback to them, but it seems there are obvious ways to mitigate the harm while keeping the good parts. Gift food. Gift something else useful. Gift money. Gift an experience. Write a thoughtful letter. While some people I know gift useless junk out of obligation, most of my friends and family have opted for alternatives. My mom still gifts useless junk, but at least it's thrifted.
This is how I think about it as well. Even though it can be stressful, and we should be striving to reduce consumption, it's a nice way to show you care and know something about someone. Giving people cash might be more economically efficient, but it is also alienating/individualizing in a way, and it doesn't really contribute to the strengthening of social bonds in the same way. So there's benefits and drawbacks. I've seen a lot of comments suggesting handmade gifts, and maybe that's a nice middle ground that is less consumerist while still showing you care about someone.
If the metric for "bad" gifts is the procurement of economic inefficiencies and waste, then nearly every consumer transaction under capitalism is "bad." There's horrible inefficiencies with labor relations in the production of goods, in extraction of wealth from non-capitalists, and the necessity of overproduction (including forced obsolescence) causing the majority of produced goods to be discarded early or entirely unused. Economics is a bunk science for a lot of reason, but the assumption that "the economy" is something we should value, is at the heart of the bunk. The framework necessary to consider economics a science is the problem, in the same way that phrenology can be internally consistent and reproduceable, by ignoring the societal, systemic factors of slavery.
On the topic of men's gifts. As a man, LEGO is the perfect man's gift. Hell it is the perfect gift in general for any gender. They target some sets towards adults, you use your brain just enough for it to be fun, you can take it apart and make something new later, they look good on a shelf, and the resale value almost always goes up because people love LEGO. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I'm 61M. I tell everyone to always get their man(men) a toy that is going to take an hour to assemble and/or put stickers on. Motors and batteries are great too. And then your gift to yourself is watching them time travel back to their youth. Even better when they have kids to do it with. Chances are it'll sit on a shelf collecting dust after day 1, but just try and throw it out.
I've always thought that the dollar value of christmas gifts you got as a kid was equivalent to the amount of money you managed to obtain as a kid per year.... I doubt many kids prior to early teens gets more than a few hundred dollars a year they can spend on their own. The magic of christmas would be re-experienced as an adult if you got gifts equal to your annual earnings each December 25th! :)
I love your disclaimer. I also always preface everything with "I'm barely an expert in my field, so take this next thing I'm about to say about this broader, unrelated topic with a grain of salt."
It's amazing how male RUclipsrs don't feel the need to use those disclaimers. Citation: I am a male, making broad claims about RUclipsrs, with a levels of confidence not at all backed up by my actual level of expertise. 🤦♂️
@@GSBarlev yeah, no, I hear men and male youtubers make such disclaimers all the time. I think it's just an intelligence thing (dumb people tend to think they know everything, while smart people understand the underlying complexity and thus are more doubtful).
We've been doing secret santa between the adult members in the family (9 people) for a few years and it's made gift giving much better, because when it's just the one person that you know pretty well it's easy to get a gift that makes some sense, and you can spend a bit more time or money than if you were getting something for everyone. There's a wish list so you can get the specific thing requested or something else if you have a good idea. We tried a year of no gifts for adults but at least I missed it, because the gift exchange is really the only tradition we have left.
it wouldn't be difficult if you just asked the people. Like, my family hasn't been doing surprise presents since I was a small kid and I have never received a bad gift since the time I started forming memories because I always got exactly what I wanted as a gift. The custom of surprise gifting is why this entire video exists
@@miglek9613 If I ask what people want I'm usually met with a long pause and finally an "I don't really know" they might even add something like "surprise me". Trust me I've tried the asking approach and it's rarely useful.
Nice card, gift card to a local bookstore inside, thoughtful note. Done. Nobody expects you to know what books they have read or want to read. It's slightly more specific than just cash or a gift card to amazon or some other wholesaler. Most bookstores have a bunch of other crap they can buy if they're not much into reading. They can use it in person or online in most cases. It's easy to re-gift. In terms of the formula, the goal is to put all the effort into card selection and the thoughtful note. So you're leaning heavily on the thoughtfulness to carry you through to the sweet, sweet checking off of ritual social obligations.
In my family (which is a large, festive one) the only people who exchange gifts are the ones who know each other well. If someone wants to be extra generous, they'll give everyone chocolate (cant go wrong), or a bookmark with a poem they've written, or a soapbar they made. It's very low commitment, and I'm broke so I only buy cheap gifts if there is a gift exchanging game going on. Now that I think about it, where I'm from chocolate is a popular option for christmas, the stores even have themed boxes, so the efficiency problem already has a simple solution.
I remember specifically asking for plain socks on Christmas from my aunt when I was in my late teens/early twenties. I can use socks. I wear socks every day, some of them get holes so I need more. Socks were a great gift for me. I also remember hearing "Well, I can't always get you socks, what kind of present is that?". It would've been a good one. But we can't have that, can we.
Angela, you are so right! In fact I have been refusing to participate in Christmas for about thirty years now, for the very reasons you’re talking about. I really love the reactions that I get when I say to people “oh, I don’t do Christmas.”
Another banger this video is so good. I really do love the physics videos but I'm a data scientist by trade and really about 70% of it realistically flies over my head so these videos where you introduce us all to like the base level of something else you're interested in is always so entertaining. One of my favourite channels on youtube!!
In my close family, we never give gifts. We have a meal together, sometimes go for pizza, sometimes a movie. Essentially, we just enjoy our time together.
In my family for decades only kids get gifts .the adults gather and have dinner . that is all. It is a nice tradition. When i started living in North America for the first time i saw adults get gifts on christimas .it was really weird .
This is what we have been doing for a while as well. My daughter is the oldest at 15, and I'm sure her grandparents will continue to buy he stuff/give her money for Christmas and her birthday. I just buy her things when she needs/wants them when I feel I can afford it. She wanted a new phone for Christmas (which she kind of needed anyway) so I bought it for her and gave it to her already. Seems silly to wait another 4 weeks when I already had it.
@@zbsz92in my family, the age is 21-22, and even then, it's only because they're poor and need us to chip in for tech purchases. 😂 We'll occasionally gift adults things that were specifically requested, or consumables/necessities that we know the person will use, but that's it.
@@zbsz92 the toy and other things similar ended probably around 13 and after that is little bags with candy and fruits and most important money .so money was the gift .as my grandmother said I better give you money so you can buy things you like and need I have no idea what to buy for you .
i dont know, i've been able to get that jump-for-joy type feeling and reaction as an adult giving gifts to other adults. i mean, they dont usually literally jump, but the feeling is the same. the important thing here is the gifts are usually not just objects. things like personally annotated books we can discuss, hand-painted keychains each of us has, watercolor paintings of pictures we took, a homemade meal inspired by a series we both like, etc. with the exception of the annotated books, all of them take a few hours max. im not saying nothing in this is right, just that that gift giving feeling is very much possible is as an adult without much free time
well yea, it is a little ridiculous that everyone is acting like it isnt a fun and nice tradition to do a gift exchange every year. a gift can be bought, made, found, even regifted... there isnt much reason to cry foul over wasted money when the people who are spending stupid amounts of money on hit or miss gifts are probably the type of people who can afford to spend stupid amounts of money on random things and generally do it anyway. it isnt hard for a regular sensible person to give a gift at a reasonable cost
My favorite aunt just asked us what we wanted when we were little, it was great. Eventually she just started sending us checks. Zero waste. She gets me exactly what I want every single year, she's at the top of the gift accuracy leaderboard and it's not even close
years ago a rift formed in my student house over whether this is too rediculous of a way to do christmas presents. My housemate wanted some new jeans. He went to the shops, tried some on, bought them, brought them home, gave them to his parents, they gave him cash for them, then his parents wrapped them up, and then he upwrapped them on christmas day.
This book and most economist's ideas are like if a mathematician unironically published a book about how 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ... = -1/12 and stood by the equation.
Once I had my first full time job if there was something that I wanted which was less than $100 then I would buy it. At that point I asked people to stop buying me gifts. Took a long time for everyone to get on board with it. My mother was the final holdout and continued gifting me things I didn't want or need well into my thirties.
I got out of the buying cycle by taking up ceramics as a hobby. At the end of the year, I always had more pieces than I needed, and I would enjoy matching my quirky, not-so-professional mugs and dinnerware with the people in my life who appreciate handmade things.
I think there's a happy medium between asking someone what they want and giving it to them and guessing a gift based on experience, and that's just asking for a wish list. When giving a guft based on a wish list, the gift you give still feels like a gift because the receiver has no idea what thing(s) on the list you're going to choose. Things on the list often are vague too, so it's still your job to determine which version of a thing is right for their needs. In addition, you don't have to strictly follow the list. You can also notice a pattern and find something similar. As for the question of "why doesn't the receiver buy things for themselves", the answer is that people are more likely to spend extra for gifts than they are for things for themselves. For example, I think music on vinyl is really neat, but I can never justify to myself paying extra when I can listen to the same music digitally. However, I still feel like that would be a meaningful gift to me, so I put it on my wishlist. I agree that we shouldn't feel obligated to give gifts to 40 people, though. Getting a gift from a cousin or something kind of sucks because they're always kind of generic and then I feel bad for not giving them anything.
If you want to get out of the bad gift cycles, may I recommend getting together with your loved ones and all chipping in for a special shared experience? We all contribute to a Christmas vacation fund yearly and use the money to do something together. Examples include going to an ice skating rink, laser tag, theme park, maybe traveling to the tropics. Whatever your budget is, it should be tailored to how much you money raise in the family. You get to create lasting memories doing something you normally don't do because of time or money. You bugget food into the experince too, so everyone gets good nutrition for that event. And no one has to figure out what to do with junk.
It’s not bad but perhaps not everyone wants to be part of the activity. In a sense your friends or family may be subsiding people who are enjoying the experience more.
My uncle has kept the tradition of coming up with an event and paying for it for years and it’s great which works because he has a lot of disposable income. It could also be a tradition to plan something together at Christmas but at that point it’s just planning to do something and to me that’s not related to giving gifts. Still, it is a Christmas tradition I would prefer to the gift giving we have now.
@btarczy5067 That sounds wonderful. That's how it is for us. Some pay more, some pay less. We decide what to do as a group and tailor it to what funds we have, so no one is pressured to pay beyond their means. Since it's about spending time with loved ones, we don't really complain about whether we got to do the exact thing we wanted. Because that's not the point. Sometimes, we just get lawn games and have a picnic in the park. Sometimes, we do something really random that none of us have ever done. So we can all laugh at ourselves being untalented. It's lovely and full of love. And much less pressure than presents.
My entire extended family has pretty much given up on buying gifts for each other haha, even within my immediate family its just like "yeah I'll bake a nice cake or get some expensive meat for dinner or something" because none of us need more OBJECTs
Five years ago I picked up online chess as a hobby so, that Christmas, I received 5 different chess boards as gifts. I was left with two options to use these gifts: 1) regularly rotate which board I display in my tiny apartment (lame); 2) train my memory every day for 10 years and hold a mandatory-attendance blindfolded simultaneous exhibition match against everybody that bought me board So far I've done neither but at least I have 5 years left on option 2
I guess I forgot chess sets that are for public use or sets that are artsy gimmicks. Don't get your friend a giant chess set. Maaaaaybe get them the 4D chess set from Star Trek but maybe ask first. Don't get them a chess set to take to the park. Maaaaaybe get them a chess set table being thrown out by a coffee shop but definitely ask first. Don't 3d print them a spherical chess set. Maaaaybe carve them a piece from their favorite without asking.
Being good at simuls isn't contingent on remembering each boards position. It's moreso about being such a strong player (or sufficiently more strong than your opponents) that you're able to accurately select from the best moves in *any* given position.
This is why I’m such a huge advocate of food gifts. “That’s not a gift” you say, “you’re just grocery shopping for people” not if you do it right! There’s so many cooking ingredients and food items that I’d love to have but just cannot justify the cost of without an occasion. Fancy olive oil, fancy cheese, saffron, rare spices, all great gifts to me. This also has the problem of only working well for people you know pretty well, but I think it at least mitigates some waste.
32:58 But that IS gift giving! At least in my family. Everyone makes a wishlist about 1-2 month before christmas and we've got groupchats for each person where we (everyone except the person whose wishlist we're discussing) communicate, who bought / made what for the person. That way we only give things that are actually wanted and we don't accidentally give double gifts. Unfortunately our extended family isn't in on that and they do sometimes get us gifts that aren't particularly liked, but in that case, trading is explicitly allowed and encouraged. Why do gifts NEED to be surprises? Is this some american culture thing that I don't get?
Maybe! I mostly only get wishlist gifts for my parents - my friends and extended family get care packages of homemade sweets and hot cocoa mix - but we all agreed 'no surprises' about the time I was old enough to give gifts myself, and people keep being shocked and baffled when I explain this because "it's no fun if it's not a surprise!". No, actually, it's more fun if it's not a surprise, because I'm anticipating getting something I actually want!
I’ve been looking for a comment that challenges her definition of “gift,” and after far too many finger swipes, I’ve arrived at your comment. Congrats. I guess in the population of people that watch her videos and feel compelled to leave a comment, there’s just not that many who find her definition far too narrow.
This video was awesome. I'm an economics undergrad focusing on behavioral economics and I can absolutely relate to how excited about talking about these ideas you get around the 37 minute mark. It's just... so fascinating to apply scientific analysis to human financial and decision behavior and end up with observations like this. I love all of your takes on this topic, and completely agree with your analysis. Gift giving in the way most people do it is so weird! To be honest, my extended family mostly stops giving each other gifts around the 18yo. mark, so it was really interesting to be reminded how prevalent this type of gift giving is while seeing an economic lens applied to it. I don't have close coworkers or anything, and I usually just offer my friends artistic commissions if we exchange gifts at all, so it's easy to forget that bad gifts (and I agree that they're terrible) are way more common. It definitely has to do with the fact that we're Jewish and celebrating Chanukah, but yeah. I always kind of wonder who is buying the box sets of hot sauce and beard oils from Buzzfeed articles, but it's true that people must be. Both the Planet Money clips and your breakdown were absolutely captivating. I'll definitely be watching the full Planet Money episodes next. Thank you for making these video essays, they're always so engaging and insanely interesting. You have a gift for science communication, and I love your sense of humor and how you balance it with the current of horrifying data about how humanity lives under capitalism that underlies this conversation.The beats with the headlines shown really get at how it feels to research these topics. I'm looking forward to whatever topic is up next, and so so happy you decided to dip into a field that I care so much about. Merry Christmas!
I’ve noticed in the progress of your video so far is that the essence of the quality of emotion attached to the gifts is tied far more to the time given than the currency spent. 25:43 my grandmother was a painter on porcelain and she made dolls for the girls in the family and I was the only boy for a long time and she painted a China plate for me and put on images of all the things I liked that she painted and she put on all the things from an era a generation before mine so it looked kinda wrong but she made it into a clock and that’s a cool gift I got at probably age 10
As someone with an economics degree, I find the idea that gifts should just be cash or cash-equivalents bizarre. You can account for exactly how much you give to others and how much you get back, being able to quantifiably balance gifts like a checking account leads you to think about whether you net gained or lost wealth. If I give someone 100 dollars, and they give me 100 dollars, nothing happened; and if we give each other different amounts then it can lead to embarrassment because the monetary discrepancy can be used as an easy method to measure and judge the feelings of others.
My complaint in calling Economics a “hard science” is that it treats people as if they are just variables in an equation, or beings whose behavior is perfectly rational and predictable. Reducing human behavior down to complex math equations doesn’t make sense. Like, foundational ideas like “barter economies” have been proven to be myths, and yet they still serve as the rationale for modern economic theory.
ya but the weird thing is that on very large scales humans basically do act like pure variables. like once you're looking at how a country full of people act when a new thing comes out of the news says a thing you can super accurately predict a ton of things and most of the time it's right. that's not to say economic theories are totally fool proof but the extent to which humans can be modeled by an equation is unexpectedly high
@@iansalinas412 Until something changes, which economics rarely predicts. Economics has a consistent problem of basing its analyses in the specific reality of the present and the relatively recent past, because they are what can be quantified, but the conditions underpinning that dataset are socially and historically constituted, and therefore beyond the bounds of 'hard science'. It then uses that faulty grounding to make bad extrapolations towards a universal that doesn't exist, because social circumstances change over time (sometimes very quickly). Contemporary economics can make reasonable predictions about a bunch of things for the relatively near future, and if it was perfected it could probably make better predictions about a bunch more, but eventually those non-scientific factors will change to the point where current theories, however comprehensive, will be next to useless. For that reason it is by no means a hard science. Protons cannot get together and decide to ignore gravity, but people could get together and decide to ignore property. One is a fundamental law of nature, the other is a social construct.
That myopic economic formula sounds more like a love letter to capitalist philosophy. We live in a capitalist society that exrudes value from labor, effort, and everything else. The system encourages us to consume not just for ourselves, but for others. The purpose of the altruistic gift in society is not for it to be analyzed as a line item for its economic value, it is not meant to be a commodity. The purpose of the altruistic gift is to reinforce social bonds within society, not to reinforce transactional relationships. Capitalism utilizes this in order to create more "value" from things that aren't necessarily ethical to commodify. You might find the book The Gift by Marcel Mauss of interest. So yes I agree, don't buy people stuff that is ultimately going in the trash. Anti-consumption is a good thing. But so is not being an ass-Scrooge towards your relations because you're keen on acting smart.
Thank you for the video. I love giving and receiving gifts, but have basically checked out of Xmas because it is has sucked the spontaneous joy out of all of it.
Hot Take: Gift giving is great if you have friends with expertise you don’t. For instance, I know almost nothing about painting but kinda enjoyed watercoloring once or twice. Asked for water color supplies and my mother in law (who has been recreationally painting for the better part of a decade) knew exactly what to get with no work on my part! Plus, this opens the door for bonding as that invites the gifter to introduce the giftee to the hobby!
Brilliant, thank you! This video is why I'm so wild about your channel. It's been a long time since I've been in such enthusiastic agreement with someone, watching and thinking yes, yes, YES! Edited to add: As other commenters have said, this video is such a gift! Perfect and completely unexpected!
For creative types, if one has the time, handmade gifts are the cheapest and most effective gifts one can give someone. Otherwise, the best thing to do is to think about the person closest to oneself to give a good gift.
Bad handmade gifts can be a burden too. Unlike bad store bought carp you feel compelled to keep it, thus costing you valuable storage space for eternity. Come to think of it- that's the gift I'd most appreciate - storage space.... perhaps with a bit of time too.
I sometimes did get a really heartfelt reaction from giving gifts because it was an "I didn't even know this existed" situation. The one i remember most is when i gave a girl friend of mine, who always folded little paper boats when she was bored and would then just give it the next person she saw, a boat in that shape except I made it from a sheet of stainless steel by bending, welding, cutting and polishing. But as said in the video that was made by me from an idea I had and I didn't even look up if you could buy it. yea so for christmas I very much like the idea of secret santa because it limits the amount of people you have to think about giving a gift to; Better still IMO is DIY secret santa in which everyone just does something he's good in and think about how the giftee would enjoy something made with your skill.
What I've learned from this is that people are just bad at giving gifts (or they have a really stupid definition of gifts). I have received maybe two bad gifts in my life. But also, who the heck says a gift has to be something the person didn't ask for? I've never once thought that or been told that. Doesn't everyone just ask for a bunch of stuff they want or need and receive a small portion of that list (and maybe sometimes get something you mentioned you need once, and someone gets it for you after you forgot)? That's how it's always gone in my family. Also, no one is forcing people to buy gifts for 40 different people (whether that is an exaggeration or not. That's insane). The most I've ever done is give gifts to my immediate family (maybe because I don't talk to anyone that frequently), and that was the same for my parents when I was a kid; they never once thought about giving gifts to relatives (especially since we live nowhere near them. No one cares. Maybe it's just because I've always been really stingy and never buy stuff unless I need it to survive, so I actually appreciate getting things I want from people (also, I despise internet shopping, so I do it as little as possible; and really love physical shopping). The only things I actually buy for myself are things no one would ever buy for me, or things I would never ask someone to buy for me, even if they did know. I'm glad I'm not living in the cynical gift giving world, because I'm cynical about enough stuff already (especially internet shopping and the internet in general). (And seriously, people are doing White Elephants wrong too? Every one I've been to has been a bunch of funny garbage that is meant to be to give a good laugh.) I hate Christmas more and more each year, but not because of the general gift-giving environment in my home. I just hate all of the capitalist garbage around the holidays and the grating music that starts in October, when it should start only in December (when I actually enjoy it), or at least right after Thanksgiving. It's funny that I'm the one that hates Christmas now, but appreciates gift-giving as a concept (thankfully, I do love Christmas again this year). But also, I only really ever want a load of books, so I might just be easy to give gifts to, since I talk about books all the time.
It's almost like humans are more complex than one single box. So maybe gifts are bad for some people, but not everyone. Of course. Because it would be stupid and infuriating if that wasn't the case.
I will say, you don't need to get loads of gifts for a person every year. It could even be some sort of experience that you all enjoy together as a couple or family. Getting gifts for everyone in your extended family is just about the stupidest thing I've heard, so just focus on the people that actually matter in your everyday life. Within a year, it is likely that they will think of at least one thing they want to do or have that they would not normally buy themselves. And not buying a gift is always an option too. You can make them their favorite meal, or spend time baking, or something like that. You don't just have to buy kitschy garbage if you don't know what else to get them. I'm sure all these smart people can think of something, just one thing, to get someone they love and spend time with.
Thanks. I've worked in offices plenty in my career. When they did the inevitable 'Secret Santa' crap (which I will always hate), I made it clear that all I wanted was a gift card to a book store. Any book store. That's it. Men could have a closet full of soap-on-a-rope, bad aftershave, ugly belts, & socks all in the wrong colors. But we systematically get rid of it. Except for the ugly sweaters. We're required by law to keep those in the back of the closet. Our wives will say, "Why don't you wear that cute sweater crazy aunt Cindy got?!". We say, "It's right here, but I'm not wearing it. If you try & force me to, I'm not going at all, so bite me". Isn't that a fun game? No. tavi.
I think it’s gotten a little better, but for women it was always Bath & Body Works (and similar) lotions etc. I used to get positively SNOWED with random gift sets at Christmas, I had so many in my closet. A boring, no-energy gift, never the scents an individual would prefer, and as a woman, a little minimizing. (Like zero chance I’d get anything cool or funny or weird bc I was a female so everyone knew just buy her Bath & Body Works! lol) I keep one bottle of unscented Eucerin for any body lotion needs I might have at any given time lol.
I love this video. My family and extended family know that I don’t buy gifts for birthdays and Christmas… but I do periodically find just the right gift for someone, and give it to them on whatever random day is convenient. They always appreciate that special and thoughtful gift given from only love rather than obligation. THAT gift has real value.
I'm not sure if I agree with your ending (pre credits). During your introduction you described a gift as something given freely where you don't care what they do with it. Considering this, I think it's perfectly acceptable to give people "exploratory" gifts. For example, I had never played competitive card games before. My best friend is REALLY into Magic: The Gathering. He says "I know you're not going to spend the time and money to get into something so complicated you're not sure you'll like, so I went ahead and put together a deck that I think will be simple and fun for a beginner". And he was right. I didn't keep up with it as a hobby, but I did have a lot of fun gaming with him and a few other friends. And I learned a new hobby. Sometimes a gift can be a good way to expose someone to something you'll think they'll like but wouldn't get out of their comfort zone and do. As long as it's given freely, IE with the understanding they might not like it / use it / sell it.
Honestly the one type of gift i felt i value the most, is that random gift from a random day that someone got just because it reminded them of me. Because even if the thing is small it gives a clear message that the guy is always thinking of you even if it's tangential or unintentional, it's showing that they care about you and your interests
Wait, do people in other countries not ask their friends and family what they want gifted???? Like, of course you're getting bad gifts if people gift stuff without asking what you want, that's absolutely insane as an idea
When people ask me what I want for christmas, I almost always end up saying I don't know. If I want/need something enough for it to be worth money to me I already bought it.
Yeah, around here (Georgia, USA), A Christmas gift can be seen as a challenge of how well you know someone. You should be so intuitive and considerate that you can read your friend's and family's minds, buying them the perfect gift that not even they know that they want, but it is so perfect. It's ridiculous.
![Lethal Company Music Video 🎵 "Follow The Orders" [VERSION A]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/QeooZB4Z7RA/mqdefault.jpg)
When I bring this up with my wife she calls me a Grinch 😂
But the point of the movie is that Christmas is not about presents! That’s the moral the grinch learns! That’s the whole point!
@@acollierastroYeah but did his heart increase in mass or volume? That's the real question! ☃️
@@acollierastro okay Grinch...
@@BenReillySpydr1962Both. Sadly the event left the Grinch with severe megacardia.
I bet the reason of the 'Grinch' is to teach children about the 'cringe' of a ruined christmas.
I'm going to send this video to everyone who gives me bicycle-themed junk for Christmas.
you need to send everyone a simple letter saying "Not Just Bikes"
Well then you should've called your channel "I hate bikes"
@@andregatorano6294 lol
Cool to see NJB here!
Babe wake up, Not Just Bikes watches acollierastro!
This kinda happened without any planning, but I found out one of my colleagues at work had the same birthday as me. We were pretty close for co-workers and shared a lot of the same sense of humor and interests in things.
Somehow, we hit on a tradition where I would just buy something for myself that I wanted, and bring it to work and thank him for it, and he'd do the same. He got new boots he liked, and I got a cool pair of expensive sunglasses I wanted. This went on for a few years. It was hilarious.
I think this is one of your funniest videos yet. Thanks for what you do.
That’s so cute! I love buying myself stuff for my birthday but this adds this nice layer of someone else thinking of you :D
Now see, that's surprisingly actually possibly a good gift. It's not the gift you buy for yourself, it's the permission you give each other to stop feeling guilty and buy that thing you've been wanting. That won't apply to everyone of course, but some of us have trouble with that.
This is like the "treat yourself" tradition Tom and Donna had in Parks & Rec. They'd pick a day once a year when they would just indulge their desires, buying fancy clothes or jewelry or going to expensive spas. Maybe all we really need is friends who encourage our happiness 🙂
Some ideas wrt modern sustainable architecture: docs.google.com/document/d/14DrTrOp0LUkelAWq9S1rWoN8iIIuHOcraZKb2HKqX5M/edit?usp=drivesdk
“Isn’t it cute how silly little humans behave” is literally my entire discipline of Anthropology summed up.
But the cool thing is to discover all the other different possible sillinesses. About gifting the gift-economy: I forgot the name of some island tribes.. they would not directly trade with each other, too dangerous, too much chance one party overpowering the other, they would leave "gifts" on the beach.. the other would take it, and leave stuff they would consider comparable.. and that would go on forever. (as in until European colonists drove them out)
Some anthropology, to summarise its subject as "silly little humans". I was learning a different kind of anthropology at the university, as one of the subjects when I studied philosophy and logic.
Its not cute, its like something stabbing itself in the foot with a fork repeatedly, even if you take the fork away it finds another.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!
A Midsummer Night's Dream Act 3, scene 2, 110-115
Anthropologie amirite
My parents always say I'm hard to buy gifts for because I don't want anything. I always respond that that makes me VERY EASY to buy gifts for, because they can get me NOTHING and I'll be happy. That's what I think they should have done for Kenny Malone in the podcast episode: the one thing we know for sure about Kenny Malone is that he thinks Christmas gifts are bad, so getting him nothing would show that we understand him and know what he values.
I agree! I’d prefer to receive and give no gifts other than ones that are spontaneously motivated.
Or make a donation to a charity he likes if you want to do some signalling
I'm stealing this. but, you won't be missing nothing, so we'll both be happy!
It's just really tricky to wrap. 😉
@@Deipnosophist_the_Gastronomer My parents would wrap it in the largest box with a set of boxes inside leading to a note that explains they got him nothing & they'd think that was HILARIOUS.
"Sometimes you have 40 peoples to buy for." What? Ok, we're clearly in completely different cultures here. I have to buy for 3 people and I have already no idea what to buy.
Just having a couple extra siblings will increase the size of your social group EXPONENTIALLY
i buy for zero people. you can too.
Disowning my family solved that issue.
Just buy them a spice set or liquor if you don't know what to buy.
@@Mastikator as someone who had to quit drinking 6 years ago, liquor is not a universally applicable gift.
🤔 what about... toilet paper
I came to this conclusion way back 15 years ago. I decided that in obligatory gift giving situations (family Christmas gatherings) that I would make food for everyone. A common one I did was bake baklava and give it to everyone to take home. This accomplishes several things- it’s more impressive than the effort that I spent time on it bc it seems like it’s really difficult to make (but it’s not), it’s something that everyone in my family likes so there’s economy in time to decide, it’s relatively inexpensive, and it gets used (bc they eat it) so it’s not wasteful.
Home cooking as a gift is such a flex. Or hand-knitted sweaters, stuff like that.
@@LimeyLassen when my bf asked me what to get me for my birthday, i asked him to bake me a lime pie. If it was someone who regularly baked (like me), it wouldn't really be the same. Just a one evening job. But since he didn't bake, it was special. I was impressed that he actually put in the effort and made it for me. And then he also had some stories to tell about how he conquered these challenges, like cracking and separating eggs.
Lime pie isn't even available in stores here, so it's also pretty cool to eat.
i've always wanted to try making baklava, maybe for this Christmas then, thanks for the recommendation :)
@@LimeyLassen The mention of hand-knitted sweaters is a little funny because of the concept of the "sweater curse", a superstition that gifting a handmade sweater to a significant other will inevitably lead to the relationship failing in short order. There is a wikipedia article about this but the tldr is that hand-knitting an entire sweater is extremely time consuming and likely involves a lot of introspection by the knitter so if the recipient's enthusiasm for the gift doesn't match the knitter's expectations, it can cause new problems or cause one or both parties to realize existing problems in the relationship leading to a breakup.
Handmade baked goods are much easier so less disappointment even if the recipient doesn't like them!
I’d trade faceted gemstones for homemade baklava.
I was really tickled at Tolkien for coining a word needed for societies with semi-voluntary gift giving. The kind of gift you generally got was a "mathom." A mathom is a gift that is useless or useless to you that you really can't get rid of except as a regift. He goes on to tie this into a tongue in cheek just so story about the invention of the museum (or, in the Shire -- Mathom House).
haha I love this! Gonna be popping that term into my personal lexicon!
Ceremonial gift-giving is not necessarily something that required the invention of a new word. In Malinowski's anthropological study of the polynesian islands around the turn of the 20th century he identified what was called a 'kularing', which served a very similar purpose.
@@raoultitulaer74tolkeins whole thing was making up new words and then making a new world for them to exist in
Too bad Tolkien was a professor of English, not one of the Polynesian languages. @@raoultitulaer74
My wife and I buy our own gifts and then pretend it was given. She has given me a new Kayak, a new osciliscope, MSVC compiler, a 3D printer ... and she always know exactly what I want :) She is awesome ;)
Isn't the MSVC compiler free?
@@JulianSildenLanglo In 2012, no. I use g++ now - that's free :)
@@JulianSildenLanglo It depends! There are licensed versions that cost money depending on what use licence you need.
why wouldn't you just use gcc or clang?
You are so spot on about the 'being the _____ guy' trope. Mine wasnt star wars, but socks. One time I was one of the groomsmen for a friend of mines wedding. The gift he gave the groomsmen were the cool mint green/blue argyle socks that went with the full ensemble, so I'd wear them from time to time since the socks meant a lot to me and reminded me of my friend. That somehow translated into be being a "socks guy" and now I get argyle and rick and morty socks every year....
The commenter above you only wants socks, maybe you can trade.
@@justforplaylists PFFFT. I read this and when I tell you I *wheezed*
I've preempted bad gifts from my students by telling them I only want food. I'm down to only one untouched mug a year now!
Flashback to an elementary school $5 gift exchange where I thought the only plausible gift (and all I wanted) was chocolate/candy, and I got a Star Wars extended universe novel instead.
@@DFGdanger Which one?
@@g.f.martianshipyards9328 Don't remember. I didn't read it.
My mom spent 8 bucks on a mug for me and I do not use mugs and she is my mom, so she knows I do not use mugs. I know it was 8 bucks because the price was on it.
@@815TypeSirius😢
My partner and I have stopped giving each other holiday specific gifts (yes, including birthdays) years ago. We just do nice things for each other throughout the year and that's good enough. We get weird looks and awkward convos when discussing this with other people though. I do appreciate my mom who, since my childhood, has asked for a specific gift list. My family and I won't be surprised, but then we'll actually get what we want. She's also been buying us more 'experiences' (tickets to events or plays, etc.) which can often be better than a gift too, with less potential waste. I don't mind not being blown away by a surprising perfect gift if it means way less trash.
Same here. Live across the pond tho. Kinda common practice in my social circle, its sorta faux pas to buy random crap. My BF is British, when I came over to his family Christmas these past holidays, there was a lot more awkward trash. Must be an English speaking country thing. The entire Christmas culture shabang definitely exists but has this weird artificial Americanised vibe over here of companies trying to sell you on garbage. Same with black Friday; over here they turn it into "black week", "black month" (not kidding), then have a 10 percent discount on their overpriced low end products (compared to prices online). I go look at it every year to get a good laugh and also be depressed about how capitalism is ruining our culture and the cool traditions we once had.
The gift on the podcast of their own book was clearly the best one. She might not have said it, but I’m sure she went home thinking about how great the exposure for her book was on that episode. Plus, she earned $0.10 on royalties for that purchase.
This is why I love my secret santa exchange with my friends, where all of the gifts are so intimately picked out for comedy value that you're basically paying $20 to make them laugh hysterically rather than picking something generic from a list based on a small thing they like. For example, one year I got "The Monolith", an 8 foot tall construction of lumber and aluminum foil that was the most unwieldy abomination, but we were all crying laughing for 10 minutes as it was presented to me.
your friend group sounds awesome :) mine tries to do something like that, but haven’t gotten near as good as “the monolith”
Sorry if this is a downer, but if youre all essentially getting each other gag gifts what do you do after you're done laugh and go home? Do you still keep it and have it take up space in your home the rest of the year?
@@anniee5487 depends on the gift. The airtag, football player prayer candle, sleep aid, and funny T-Shirts can get lots of use past just the day itself. But for those items that are a one-off laugh, I think of it like paying $20 for drinks for a night out with friends or a putt-putt place or whatever else. Those are also just one-off things you spend money on then go home after with nothing to show for, but the experience and laughter with friends is worth it. And yeah some of them take up space, but when you stumble upon them with the rest of the junk that's a lot less funny, you get residual laughs, especially when those friends are around.
@anniee5487 gag gifts, like almost all ephemera, are unceremoniously disposed of when their usefulness has been exhausted.
If it sends someone into a laughing fit like that, I'd argue that it's pretty useful and justifies its own existence. The same cannot be reliably said about some random plastic thing from Spencer's.
As a "generic man" the only gift I want for Christmas, New Years, birthday, whatever gift giving occasion... is socks.
Seriously, just buy me socks.
I don't want mall ninja crap, tacti-cool beard trimmers, scented anything, I just want goddamn socks.
I don't care what they look like, they can have floral patterns, squares, triangles, tartan, they can be with cats, dogs, capybaras, blue, green, black, gray, I don't care, buy me socks.
I don't care what thickness they are, if they're thick winter ones I'll put them on immediately, if they're light summer ones, I can wait till summer.
Just buy me socks.
Wool socks also for men in the north. I am literally wearing the pair I got last year because I asked for one. Great gift! She got to knit them, I get to wear them, the equilibrium has been maintained.
But if it is from an attractive woman (your wife if you are married), a blow job in Christmas outfit, Easter bunny costume, ... would be fine too?
When I was about 12 I decided that I'd make it easy for my aunts and uncles, and when they asked me what to get I'd say socks. To *one* uncle, I said that I'd like to get the kind of white cotton socks which work well for gym classes. I ended up getting *31* pairs of white socks, and two pairs of dress socks which had color to them. 🙂
I would just add that merino wool socks are one of the most comfortable things in the world.
I need t-shirts and undershirts too. don't bother with that wallyworld shite, I need quality cloth which will last me until next giftmas!
huge factor missing in the gift value equation is the anxiety and energy spent on figuring out what gift to give and worrying about whether it'll be good and what reaction it'll have
sure some people enjoy that, but for others this vastly outweighs any value that could be gained from gifts and shaming people for not giving or not "putting in enough effort" is exactly the cause of the problem
In my family we kind of make the energy and effort the gift. (Also we all kind of hate surprises) My mom wanted cocktail glasses this year and my dad wanted a nice wooden cutting board. And yes, those items are the gift, but also me doing the research and comparison shopping instead of them doing it is part of the gift too.
@@MissaBrevisthis is how me and my husband do gifting I think now that you mention it. We both are very particular people. Its hard to buy gifts for this reason BUT it’s perfect for effort as the gift.
We tell eachother the thing or concept we need or want and can truly trust that the other is just as neurotic as ourselves. My husband knows when I say “those the best long johns you can buy” that I’m not joking and I checked. And he didn’t have to do any of the labor of that joy.
We both value our time over almost anything so the appreciation is high both ways.
Scientifically proven that sandwiches made by anybody other than yourself taste better to you.
We all just have to find what feels like a gift to us and to our loved ones. 💓
@@MissaBrevis absolutely, the effort should be the gift!
@@chlobes that's an excellent point, I see what you mean. In my case I love my parents dearly but they're settled, financially stable people and much more likely to help me out than the reverse in our day to day lives, so holiday gifts are a rare opportunity for me to concretely show my love rather than an obligation - but when I stop and think about it, of course my experience is unfortunately far from universal.
If you know someone well enough you know their likes and dislikes, so there shouldn't really be any great effort or anxiety involved in 'figuring out' what to get that person. And if you don't know them closely why would you even be giving a gift.
The ten thousand dollar gift is acceptable because it automatically comes without the expectation of anything in return, or at least without the expectation of anything that can bought from a store for that amount of money.
Such a large gift is almost always really
a. A form of generational wealth transfer
b. An act of charity
c. A bribe
d. Some combination of the above
😊
the internet having ruined Christmas is something that's frustrated me for years and it is so vindicating to hear it discussed in such detail. Thank you Dr. Collier
I may be very Northern European™ but I do believe that if you're giving a gift, either it has to be either: 1) on the recipient's public wishlist 2) liquid assets. Gift cards and cash fit in envelopes, people. Nobody ever got mad about recieving a "here's 100€, buy yourself something nice."
Also, all social subsidies programs that don't give out cash are fundamentally paternalistic and disrespectful of the autonomy of poor people.
Or 3) consumables, like nice candy, scented candles, or something similar (that you know the recipient likes).
Agree to a large extent. The issue with cash is that I need to give you a cash gift in return. So what's the point? Gift giving among adults is stupid. Children should receive gifts of course.
Even a gift card can be money poorly spent though, unless it's extremely generic like a Visa card. "Oh, this Amazon gift card can buy me almost anything, but actually I need gas in my car."
Is prioritising housing over freely usable money a paternalistic approach? Is prioritising spending money on food instead of substance abuse such? Sadly I see these people willing to risk their life for the purpose of getting their heads messed up for a day every time I leave my more affluent neighbourhood. Here in the Northern Europe it can take just one night of such behaviour to die of it, at least during the winter.
Why cash? Why not just transfer that 100 EUR? Saves a trip to the ATM and buying envelopes
I think another reason why Christmas gifts are bad is that we ask people for their Christmas Lists. I mean, you even did it when you asked what would make us jump for joy. But what really makes you jump for joy is the surprise of getting the perfect gift that you never even considered. And when we spend more time making christmas lists, we end up spending more time trying to figure out what we want than the people who get us the gift spend, which leads to a loss in happiness.
its interesting how diverse gift giving is as a cultural thing. it‘s never even occurred to me that people might make Christmas lists.
The way I've personally tried to solve this problem is "give a gift that has use value" and that's pretty much the only marker. I just want someone to get a thing they're going to use. Easier for kids when I know their hobbies and I can get them something they can't get themselves (because they don't have money and would have to ask their parents), but for adults I look for things that have use value. A nice towel, consumables like tea are always killer because if its good tea hey they'll drink it every once in a while and then it's gone and they'll enjoy it, cool socks (be it comfy or just high quality) and always make sure it's a small amount of thing. A single nice towel, 8 cups of tea worth of tea, 1 pair of socks, etc. So far I've had a lot of success with this type of gift, though not perfect success. But if we're going to keep giving gifts, I feel like this is a good heuristic to go off of. General gift that person would kind of like and also use.
I love the word heuristic
Some of my go tos: high end peppercorns with a grinder, same for salt. High quality olive oil and/or vinegar. Fancy pastas. Basically, things I know the person likes to eat, but on the luxury end where they wouldn’t splurge on it for themselves.
which is why I gift snacks, at least they can be eaten
You put into words what I've been feeling for so long. There's a wood toy and a book that have been sitting still wrapped on my shelf for more than one christmas. The only person who got me gifts I end up using is my sister, who got me socks with my cats faces on them and glasses that are slightly larger than the ones I used before.
It also took me 10 years to finally get my family to understand that I wasn't into Star Wars anymore
Not only a waste of money, the cost of producing these unwanted items only for them to wind up in a landfill.
Every year my step-mom buys me 3-5 shirts with slogans on them, “but first, coffee” kind of stuff. I know she gets them cheap as dirt in Amazon and they’re usually very ugly and fall apart quickly. Like gee thanks for the slave-made garbage
This is why if you're close with family, asking is usually a better idea! That way you also get to know who they are more and bond together ❤️ or cash if u don't want that 🤣
That's one and the same issue
For an example of a great Christmas present I got as an adult, several years ago my sister-in-law scrolled through my Pinterest pages and found a pin I’d saved to my stuff I love board that was a cool scarf I saw on Etsy that looked like a fox curled up on its tail. She crocheted me her own version of it. I was stunned and so excited when I opened it. I still wear it all the time.
I steal everything I gift to other people so the store gets paid from the insurance and if the person recieving the 2 lbs of brown rice doesn't like it and throws it away nothing is lost . 100 % efficiency achieved .
The insurance pays and passed on the cost to the retailer, which passes it on to everyone who buys anything from the store including very poor people who are actually negatively affected by small changes in the price of something like brown rice.
@@edwardkuenzi5751 joke, noun
a: something said or done to provoke laughter
especially : a brief oral narrative with a climactic humorous twist
b(1) : the humorous or ridiculous element in something
(2) : an instance of jesting
@edwardkuenzi5751 it depends on a store. On chain stores it doesn't affect much, but don't shoplift on local stores. That's not really great for anyone
This is so dumb.
Who would _throw out_ a 2lb bag of brown rice?? That is literally the perfect gift!
Technically that’s more than 100% efficiency, it’s infinite efficiency
My family stopped doing Christmas gifts a few years back and the holidays have been so much more fun.
When we stopped, I was still living at home while I got through college, and that meant I was an adult with just a bed room, so I had no space for random stuff I didn't need or wasn't exactly the object I needed. Aside from making it hard to shop for me, actually it made receiving gifts stressful. Now I either needed to decline to dispose of it or find a spot for it, and the only socially acceptable one took up valuable space I didn't have.
My sister in law did that thing at their wedding where they showered everyone in tchotchkes commemorating the day, which is a much more important day for them than me, I'm just a guest there. But it's also stuff I mostly still have because it's got my name on it, literally, and it's faux pas to throw it out. And that's annoying: I didn't need it, I was perfectly happy just showing up and having food and company.
I guess in the end I'm just saying that a bad gift can literally have negative value, and good gifts don't happen on a calendar schedule.
Personally, for a long time I've thought waiting to do (almost obligatory) gift giving until christmas was silly. I much prefer the idea of if I happen to see something while I'm doing whatever shopping that makes a certain person come to mind so strongly that I know I have to get this thing for them, and give it to them the next time I see them.
I think little random gifts throughout the year like that can mean more because it's not done out of a feeling of social obligation. I also think of it as sporadic potential pick-me-ups because we all have stuff going on generally and it's nice to know that someone's reminded of you by something.
💯
Wow, that's exactly my thoughts as well!
Re start of video: Economics is the science of using fancy math to justify your existing preconceptions.
Socks. Who doesn't need socks? Warm, wooly socks, thin dressy socks, everyone loves socks for Christmas.
Who wouldn't love that item that appears on every top 10 worst gifts list?
@@DFGdanger If I learned anything from this video, it's that lists on the internet are bad!
I find all sorts of gift-giving in general to be stressful. When I was a kid, it was good, and it was able to introduce me to new things-I was a kid! Most things were new to me. Civilization IV was, in terms of the amount of enjoyment I got, one of the best gifts ever. Now, though, I doubt anything could come close to that, because... I already know what I like. And now I also need to reciprocate, which is incredibly stressful.
nah, you don't need that stress, friend. you cannot control how others percieve you, so defenestrate those thoughts!
A video specifically for me, what a lovely christmas gift :)
I thought I hated gifts for a long time, but I've learned that giving on my own terms when I can actually afford to put thought into it massively changes the playing field for me, and I've been able to give some damn good gifts in the last year or two. My current favorite is a bottle of authentic balsamic vinegar that I got for my dad, which is not something anyone else would have gotten for him, including himself.
in my late teens i started telling people i wanted nothing. in my 20s i told people "if you really want to get me what i want for christmas, you'll get me nothing" and people really did stop giving me stuff. i have a rule that i don't get other people gifts for special calendar days. if there's a great gift for them at christmas time, i'll buy it and hold onto it until after christmas is over and there's no gift-giving calendar day. if you get them a gift when there's no expectation for you to, then it's more real.
Loved what you said bout federal financial assistance programs. Its so crazy that they’re inefficient because of some fucked up concept of “deserving” it or not??? The economics of “deserving” is real and lowkey insane lmao 😭😭
I'm not an expert, but does the government actually pay $1 for $1 in SNAP? It's possible to get a lot of store gift cards on sale because *breakage* is factored into their value. I would have assumed (hoped?) that governments only pay for the SNAP dollars that are actually spent.
With Medicaid medicare and such, I get an OTC card benefit , but I've noticed over time they won't approve the cheapest most cost effective generic brands, only the most expensive name brands , (like $16 for 4 bandaid brand hydrocolloid bandages vs $12 for 8 generic).
They also have their "own" brand catalog.
I think it's engineered that way, they pay little over cost but only approve the most expensive items so your insurance benefits run out faster costing them less.
Acting like kickbacks but legal..
That's my conspiracy theory of the day.
@@petevenuti7355 Yeah, it's pretty insidious. I can't remember if it was John Oliver, Hasan Minhaj or Rebecca Watson who did a breakdown on "we only cover the brand name" medication-IIRC it's a deal between the pharmaceutical companies and the insurance providers.
a government could also set up factories to produce the drugs themselves as all profits a company selling drugs to the government makes is profit that if the factory were run by the government would just end up back in the budget but yeah because of pharmaceutical company lobbying, the free market doctrine of this era and a host of other reasons its normally just outsourced to whatever company lobbies the most. pharma is one of the more explicit sectors in terms of corporate-government corruption
Look up the paper "Cash vs. Food? How Does Food Stamp Eligibility Affect Food Stamp Enrollment and Food and Health Outcomes of SSI Recipients?". It's available for free. The study found that when states would offer a cash benefit for food and people would take that in lieu of SNAP, food insecurity and negative health outcomes associated with lacking food increased.
It is not unreasonable to assume that people who have trouble living independently without assistance can also have a tendency to have trouble self-regulating their assistance. That can be true without any moral judgement, blame, or moralizing about the recipient of aid.
As a man who can't grow beard at all, receiving a beard trimming kit wouldn't be just a bad gift, it would be a personal attack 😅. But more seriously, December stresses me out, the anxiety of choosing gifts and the cost... I'd rather we just all put a little bit of money to get an extra good feast on Christmas eve and that's it.
Why not just ask those close to you what sort of things they'd like as a gift? If you're given a choice of a few items then you know you'll be giving them a gift that's actually appreciated, while there's still a little surprise factor for them because they won't know WHICH of the things they listed they'll be getting.
Best liked 'unsolicited' gift I ever gave to someone was a mate of mine who casually mentioned in conversation he needed a new winter jumper because his old one was wearing out. I made a mental note, paid attention to the style and colours of the jumpers he liked to wear, then got him a nice lambswool one that fitted his taste. He wasn't expecting it but it was exactly what he wanted!
It looks to me like the problem isn’t that Christmas gifts are being given, it’s that the threshold for “knows person enough to get them a gift” is WAY too low. If it were only a handful of people, the gifts could be much better.
It really doesn't help.
The only adult I buy a gift for is my wife. I have 12 months to buy that gift, yet it's still impossible and mostly pointless.
@@martinwhitaker5096just take her out for a fancy meal and you both have a nice evening? Or let her choose something she wants for which you then pay. Does she like clothes shopping for instance? In which case she could pick an outfit (if it's affordable of course) and that's your gift to her. (substitute whatever else if she's not into clothes.)
I may be a weird person, but I grew up with “wasted gifts” and they became a weird connection years later. I remember my grandmother never used her foot bath with massage and heater, but I did after I realized no one used it and decided to use it. That goes for weird unopened cds, exercise equipment (bands no one used), or the weird jewelry box I later used to store screws for projects.
My grandpa bought my grandma a stereo photograph kit and the only thing that survived when I was around where the cards. I ended up using eBay to find a stereoscope and it was a weird moment. I think the gift was decontextualized from the original experience and gained something new (due to the novelty of a no longer used technology). I like those things, they will be the leftovers of society much like the leftovers we sometimes find in the current day. The Atari ET game survived longer than most games because in terms of archival because it was the gift left in its packaging and tossed but became the subject of a lot of people trying to find the landfill with ER games.
I think sometimes there is an underestimation of the knock on effects of bad gifts. They may not be realized right away, but I think a lot of ET kid owners got satisfaction over the years as their most hated video game had a weird story that a lot of people wanted to hear.
People and their quirks are more interesting than ways that can be tracked by asking a person their opinion. I think a central part of gift giving is the understanding that sometimes it will find a weird new home (island of misfit toys).
we're not against economics, however, economics is usually regarded as a social science because it's ultimately about human behavior. --signed, a psychologist
sometimes i feel the soft science distinction is silly in the first place. i mean science is about developing theories that can make predictions and that results and studies can be replicated. this is pretty true for economics and also sociology. so do we draw the line between soft and hard at equations? the law of supply and demand is a very rough law that breaks down yet it also describes something real and in theory very measurable-the relationship between scarcity and decision making. I mean this is such a foundational principle in economics and one that is unchanging and very physical.
and because of its connection to economics, i question the distinction with sociology, too. i mean psychology is fundamental to individual human behavior, yet sociology reveals that humans in groups demonstrate profound emergent behaviors that end up feeding back into human behavior. It connects the economic theory that people will make decisions based on their means and the reality of human behavior as imposed by our feeble minds as studied in psychology.
and not to mention this entire video and the issues here are very strongly connected to social norms. i mean this concept of gifts and gift giving is a social construct. giving money instead of a gift of equivalent market value is tacky because of society. it is so fascinating that we have gift giving in the first place and the question of why do we have it why do we have those norms.
anyway i’m not arguing i’m just a computer scientist ranting about linguistics bottled into a rant about the social understanding of certain phrases like soft science vs hard science and how the differentiation is stupid and yet it exists and i know what you’re talking about and i’m always going to live with the fact that i have this hang up about soft science vs hard science. you think i could get a free session to explain why i care so much? thanks
@@hasan7275 Yeah, my understanding from my experience in undergrad is that most social scientists aren't much a fan of the soft/hard science distinction for the reasons you put forward, and tend to prefer a distinction between natural and social sciences which more accurately describes the divide.
My Swedish family (I'm American) all buy and wrap one gift that we would like.
1) We put them on table.
2) We sit around the table.
3) 1 person roles a dice.
-) If it's a 6 you pick a gift on the table to open.
-) If it's a 1 you steal a gift.
4) We move counterclockwise around the table until all the gifts are gone.
The gift giving becomes secondary to the tradition but when someone does get a good gift it has a story behind it. It adds a fun version of the trading element. It also allows people to spend significantly less while still keeping in the holiday spirit.
I've told people to stop buying me gifts because (a) I am a grown up and if I want something I can either afford to buy it for myself, or it's too expensive for anyone I know to buy it as a gift; (ii) most gifts I receive I don't want; and (iii) getting rid of stuff I don't want (even giving it to charity or selling on eBay) makes me feel bad.
had the same philosophy about gifts, but last time my girlfriend bought me a Johny Walker Blue Ribbon, which is a really good whiskey and it cost more than 200 dollars, so I accepted that and I was glad that I was able to taste what the relatively rich drink every day.
This is precisely my position, with the addition of (iv) I'm autistic and ADHD and extremely picky about *everything* so being able to figure out my taste is effectively impossible. I spend hours researching purchases and to expect someone else to do that for me (or even with me) is untenable.
@@lunasophia9002 Hm, isn't some big puzzle good as a surprise gift for such a person? Maybe I am wrong because ADHD means you will not have enough patience and attention span to solve it...
This attitude is kind of sad really. Gift giving can be an wonderful part of maintaining community and family. But our focus on cost seems to take a lot of the joy away and you end up in this situation where you decide nothings "worth" it.
If they like puzzles it's amazing, if they don't it's a waste. The point is that they are super specific about their interests and hobbies. Just bc some people with ADHD and/or autism are drawn to puzzles or riddles, doesn't mean everybody with autism would have that same interest. Even if they would be into puzzles, they would likely own some already and be quite specifc about the ones they actually enjoy. @@ozymandiasultor9480
In my social circle, we reached the same conclusion years ago. Now, we only get gifts for the kids, and our dearest loved ones. We get to spend more time enjoying each other's company, instead of stressing over holiday shopping.
I would also like to add that IMO secret santa is one of the worst forms of "holiday waste". It usually involves cheap gifts, selected with little care or knowledge. Most of the stuff goes straight into the trash. But some people actually enjoy the silliness, despite the egregious waste.
i once did secret santa in my friend group and it was successful. the key is to communicate the budget and your personal no-no's. and the overall expectations should be communicated as well (are we doing specifically silly cheap things or are we doing something more serious? how do we feel about gifting surprise boxes? is it okay to buy holidays related stuff?). the point of secret santa is to put in the effort for one person instead of several people. so if someone gifted you 'waste' then they just didn't care. and in corporate settings that's gonna be more likely unfortunately. this video demonstrated really well that even if you collectively try hard, it's still shaky and there's still gonna be some disappointment. but secret santa can be a good middle ground for everyone. even if i receive something worse than i gifted, i'm still gonna be happy that i put the effort in but without all the stress surrounding christmas shopping. the bar really is low.
The secret to gift giving is buying those $15 galaxy lamps at Walmart. Every time there is a secret santa thing going on, people end up fighting over the damn lamp.
We do a white elephant every year... thank you for the suggestion I will be buying a $15 galaxy lamp now
oh shit man, that's some genuinely good advice!
Last time I worked at a place that had a Pollyanna, everybody fought over the gifts that were alcohol
Thank you for making this video. Now I can succinctly describe why I really hate gift giving.
I'm definitely the person who just buys what they want and who's hard to buy gifts for. And I hate trying to figure out what to buy others -- so some of my gifts have been a bit paternalistic.
It's so true that all gifts are just to try and reach the heights of giving gifts to kids.
This is why I just make my gifts every year, durable hand-made things. This year I'm making stone mortar and pestle sets. Carved from literal rocks I pull from the river.
that is awesome and I am jealous of the people who receive gifts from you
That seems the sort of thing most people wouldn't want, and therefore most susceptible to the idea presented in this video.
im gonna be honest with you chief, the only people who are ever going to use a pestle already own a pestle
i also lean towards handmade gifts, but they can indeed be very tricky. Some people just don't appreciate the effort that goes into them. Even in this video, she was talking about how these handmade sweaters used to be found in thrift shops. I have made a couple of sweaters and i would value them at least 1000€. Even the yarn itself is more than 100€, while my time is invaluable to me. And some people do indeed just throw this stuff away.
I think gifting a mortar and pestle is quite tricky as well, even for someone who might use them. I'm living in a small apartment and i don't have enough cabinet cabinet space even for a frying pan. I literally have to use a chair to get to my pan because i couldn't find an accessible storage location for it. Mortar and pestle often go near the bottom of the priority list for kitchen utensils, so i hope you'll make sure to give it only to people who have a lot of space in their kitchens or to people who really love and value handmade things.
@@Desimere Maybe consider that Tanya isn't giving the mortar and pestle to you, so your apartment size doesn't matter, and that they probably know the person they're giving them to.
The really horrible thing is children having to buy gifts for their parents. Every year my brother and I would buy my dad an engraved pen until I heard my dad say that The Shadows were a decent band and then, suddenly, all his gifts were Shadows albums, which is awkward because they weren't making new albums so it was always the same songs. Basically my dad can't express an interest in anything or that becomes all his gifts. Like last month when my nephews bought him a Billy Connolly book and he just added it to his stack of Billy Connolly books (before that it was Spike Milligan)
for parents I assume it's the thought that counts. But jesus, why don't you ask him what he wants?? why do you have to guess? that's what I do for my mom
@@moonasha talk openly to our parents about our wants and dreams? Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?
So good! I even love your reaction to the pro-gifter’s arguments - he is not extrapolating to the practice of gift giving as a whole, he has instead contrived a very deliberately “outlier” gift-giving event (spending no doubt far more time and thought on this one than any others that he gives routinely) to argue his point, misrepresenting the practice of Christmastime gift-giving.
I do have a coworker who surprises our small night shift crew every year with the most unbelievably thoughtful gifts. Like ancient Roman coins for a history buff and a portrait of Tecumseh for our guy who is obsessed with him. (that second gift, if I’m being cold as ice, I would never say is a “good gift” - as you said, decor is HIGHLY personal and wall space is limited. There is so little chance of another person’s choice being what you would ideally prefer for your shared living space).
That said, I’m the only woman on the shift, with main interests of history and science, but I got a stack of end-cap pop books on gardening. 🤷♀️
I like gardening, but I had to downsize to a small apartment - so, no garden, and I also used to have a spare room as a “library” and now I don’t, so I just have an assload of books I have no space for. So there’s an example of a THOUGHTFUL gift, but showing how he couldn’t necessarily know the circumstances that make this gift not only impractical but a bit of a burden (sitting in a teetering stack that gives me anxiety, waiting to be sold).
And to your point, books which interest me, I have hundreds saved in wish lists, and most of the books I’d care to actually read that are gardening-adjacent, I already own. (soil culture, mycelium layer, creating vernal pools - things I can’t do in an apartment but which interest me aspirationally, and much like any other non-fiction read might).
The point is, it was thoughtful yes, and I appreciated it.
But, it did sorta have the net effect of making me feel yet again “othered” as a woman working among all men, treated as not being able to like “boy things” (which means anything smart or cool 🤷♀️). They got cool history stuff, I got pop culture picture books on gardening.
His gifts to them excelled partly bc he thought he would like them himself, but for me, he bought for me “as a woman,” and these books all definitely felt like end-cap Barnes & Noble “gifts for her” purchases.
It’s a bummer that every night we’re avidly discussing all of the same things and yet I alone am given gifts which are simpler and woman-centric.
I wasn’t angry, it just happened to be a bummer, a very small blip of “same ole same ole” finding out how men can still tend to have a reductive view of me as a woman even after sharing hundreds of hours of conversation that show our interests are staggeringly similar.
Thank you for writing that out.
I am sorry for that experience, and I can see myself struggling to not make the same mistake. Especially if I don’t know you that well, even if I know your interest, it takes actual effort to look past the marketing.
Like I might know you like history, but that’s pretty wide topic. Meanwhile these ads said that all women love soft towels. I also know you definitely like history and science more than gardening, but there are so many gardening books in the “For Her” -section, and it fits both your interests and what the marketing is telling us.
Of course the sexism happens when I subconsciously interpret the “For Her” -section to mean the rest of the store is Not for you. Or that the existence of product with feminine branding means the others are not good fit for women.
Little mental effort helps to offset this, but it still makes buying gifts harder. Sometimes I catch myself thinking: “I know she would like this, but is it a good gift?” As in: it doesn’t correspond to my mental image of a gift for a woman. Which is mostly formed by advertising.
@@catcatcatcatcatcatcatcatcatca Yeah, unfortunately that’s all kinda sexist. If someone knows what I like but still chooses to opt for something reductive to my gender. And to be clear, they do know what kinds of history are my favorite. These are people I’ve shared hundreds of hours of excited conversation with.
And while I wouldn’t EXPECT a staggeringly thoughtful gift, it’s the juxtaposition of the thought put into the gifts for men that is hurtful, and the fact that he got everyone else something he would like, very literally othering me. As in..you are saying it would take effort and I am saying this person does a great job of putting in the effort, except with me bc I am a woman. It’s just a bummer.
And if someone knows someone, at all, but then decides to reduce them to a stereotype to simplify the act of giving a gift, that’s an especially “don’t bother” situation bc frankly, you’re making someone feel bad instead of good. How does that even check a box as to the intent of gift-giving? It really isn’t a kind gesture at all, just a way to avoid being a pariah for leaving out the women in your life completely.
He knows what I like, and additionally, not to be a “I’m not like the other girls,” but he truly does know that the typical things marketed to women don’t interest me. But (and the point is that this kind of thing happens OFTEN with men) the subconscious predilection to minimize me as a woman won out at the end of the day.
Kinda like how they know I’m a film buff and also that some of my favorite movies are war and history films, but they talk to each other about Napoleon assuming I am not interested in it at all. It’s my favorite director (which they know) and it’s history lol. They just still see me as “girl who likes girl stuff” for no reason other than sexism. 🤷♀️
@@catcatcatcatcatcatcatcatcatcaI just buy gifts for whichever person as an individual, not based on whether it's deemed 'appropriate' in terms of man/woman. This guideline has served me well.
Gender role training is stubbornly hard to break from. Just the same, I get beard-kit-like stuff from women in my life who know me a lot better than that. We're cultural conformation machines, often even when we know the heuristic is bad. You have to consciously fight it.
This is also evidence that real gifts can have moderately or even strongly negative value. 30% off the top is not even close to the worst case scenario.
Perspective is important. As a child, I was fortunate enough to interview my great grandmother who was born in 1912. I still have the recording. She was one of 9 children, and they lived in a 2 room (not two bedroom) apartment. Her oldest siblings had to drop out of school in 8th grade to get jobs. Anyway.
She talked about how spoiled everyone is today (using the word "spendthrift" as an insult). She said she remembered her favorite Christmas present. An orange.
I guess my point is that to someone who is poor, socks can be an amazing Christmas present. I saw a video where most homeless shelters say their number one need in winter is quality socks.
As a poor college student that lives in upstate New York I am praying for nice socks this year lmao
@@dawert2667 have a Amazon wishlist or something?
The internet didn't ruin gift giving to me, it was ruined for me long before the internet. Family and the social mandatory need to make you get everyone a gift regardless whether you can afford it or have the time for it instead of getting someone a gift because I genuinely think they'll like a thing is why gift giving was ruined for me
Every so often I think "I could use a beard grooming kit" and then I remember that I own two of them, both of which I used once, lost an essential piece immediately, and shoved into the back of the cabinet.
I have a master's in economics and know we disagree on a lot of economics. This was very well done and thought out. I want to quibble mildly with your equation. You put time and effort of the gift giver as value to add to the gift, those are actually costs that are added to the gift which make them more expensive not more valuable. What you are missing is the value the gift giver gets in the act of researching and presenting a good gift. There is non-intrinsic value both for the gift giver and receiver and for their relationship which generally is worth more than the time effort and physical value of the gift itself. Also, you're right, I only get gifts for my kids and significant others and make all of my family just give me money so I can get gifts for my kids and put their names on them because I'm a dirty economist who doesn't trust them to not buy a bunch of junk to fill my house with. Great job!
So the extra expense, if added correctly to the cost of the gift, increases its value? But, if the extra expense is wasted on a horrible gift, then the value is decreased maybe even to the point of a deficit?
Like any good (econo)physicist, she used some shorthand and threw out negligible terms.
The inequality is properly:
v_percieved > v_actual
With all terms existing on both sides and the fundamental issue being that the age of internet has effectively zeroed out the terms on the LHS-how many times have you received a garbage gift and thought, "Come on, dad, how hard would it have been to pull up my Pinterest board and then order something from Amazon?" Yet the _RHS_ terms-the actual mental effort of acquiring the gifts, hasn't _actually_ gone down because of how much more difficult it is to find items that are truly novel to the recipient.
@@liamwhalen The search costs of buying a gift are always costs, Even when you are buying it for yourself. So the internet in that way, by reducing search costs has created a ton of value. But that is only looking at the cost side of the ledger, some people really like shopping, many people like shopping for gifts even more, especially if you feel you gave a good gift this creates even more value for the giver which is often ignored, as is the value of the relationship that is built and maintained through the giving of gifts.
@@GSBarlev Is this a supply and demand aspect of the value? The demand for novel gifts increases with the associated amount of supply? Can they be considered independent of each other? The cost of the demand increases due to the scarcity of determining a truly unique gift? Whereas the supply may or may not increase the cost depending on the individual nature of the demand? For example, figuring out that someone really loves fig newtons but will not tell anyone about it due to social shaming and quietly gifting them some has a high demand novelty cost but a low supply cost.
@@liamwhalen In this case it is not really a supply-and-demand thing, which is weird because it's basically always a supply-and-demand thing. For supply and demand, you are trying to find an equilibrium price and quantity. Gift-giving is basically between two individuals and the receiver by definition has no say. What it is more, is, the giver deciding what amount of Time+Effort+Money will create the most satisfaction for the giver. In that calculation the giver will attempt to value the relationship which is enhanced by the gift and attempt to gauge the reaction of the receiver, note the giver does not have to be right, the receiver may hate the gift but if the giver perceives that they liked it then they will gain a benefit from that. But all of this happens after the fact, the gift giver is making a calculation in their head beforehand of how awesome this particular gift is going to be and only finds out what the utility is after the fact.
Food stamps don't disappear at the end of the month. I knew someone on them, and when he finally didn't need them anymore, he had something like $750 left over in his account. He spent every penny after his benefits expired. Therefore, no, food stamps are waste-free.
I went through a phase of being extremely cynical about christmas gifts, but I've mellowed on it in the past few years. While I agree with a lot of what you say, and I generally fall into the camp of believing we should all buy a lot less junk in general, I also think that the whole practice of exchanging gifts is just as much a ritual as it is an economics formula about value. And rituals are usually never rational, or efficient, or practical. Like when ancient cultures burnt the animals they'd hunted to offer them up to the gods - nobody was fed from that practice, all the effort put into that hunt was in a literal sense completely wasted. But the ritual mattered in a way that transcended whether the value of those animal carcasses was maximized. It created bonds between people - and feelings of connection between those people and the world around them - that are hard to quantify.
That's how I think about gift-giving, now. I tell my family I don't want any gifts, just to spend time with them. They always buy me something anyway. And I think that's sweet, because it's just an attempt by them to be close to me by sharing this ritual. So even if it's some dumb beard kit that I'm just going to re-sell on the internet in January, the act still means something and the connection it creates is still real.
The question is whether it's a ritual that people actually want, or one that people are scared to get rid of because they think they'll be outcasts if they stop participating. You even told your family "I don't need this ritual" and they still do it. Maybe it brings value to them, but maybe they are worried that, despite your words to the contrary, you would actually reject them if they stopped.
My mother *despises* Christmas shopping, and tells me so every year, but she still got me gifts for many years after I grew up and moved out, because she thought that I would be disappointed if one year she didn't get me anything. No one wants to disappoint their child. I truly didn't care, and said so many times, but it took years for me to convince her. No value was created for either of us by the ritual. She was just trapped in it. Social rituals tend to have this toxic quality -- they stick around long after no one actually wants them.
@just_some_commenter I'm sad that traditions can have this drawback to them, but it seems there are obvious ways to mitigate the harm while keeping the good parts. Gift food. Gift something else useful. Gift money. Gift an experience. Write a thoughtful letter.
While some people I know gift useless junk out of obligation, most of my friends and family have opted for alternatives. My mom still gifts useless junk, but at least it's thrifted.
This is how I think about it as well. Even though it can be stressful, and we should be striving to reduce consumption, it's a nice way to show you care and know something about someone. Giving people cash might be more economically efficient, but it is also alienating/individualizing in a way, and it doesn't really contribute to the strengthening of social bonds in the same way. So there's benefits and drawbacks. I've seen a lot of comments suggesting handmade gifts, and maybe that's a nice middle ground that is less consumerist while still showing you care about someone.
If the metric for "bad" gifts is the procurement of economic inefficiencies and waste, then nearly every consumer transaction under capitalism is "bad." There's horrible inefficiencies with labor relations in the production of goods, in extraction of wealth from non-capitalists, and the necessity of overproduction (including forced obsolescence) causing the majority of produced goods to be discarded early or entirely unused. Economics is a bunk science for a lot of reason, but the assumption that "the economy" is something we should value, is at the heart of the bunk. The framework necessary to consider economics a science is the problem, in the same way that phrenology can be internally consistent and reproduceable, by ignoring the societal, systemic factors of slavery.
On the topic of men's gifts. As a man, LEGO is the perfect man's gift. Hell it is the perfect gift in general for any gender. They target some sets towards adults, you use your brain just enough for it to be fun, you can take it apart and make something new later, they look good on a shelf, and the resale value almost always goes up because people love LEGO. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I'm 61M. I tell everyone to always get their man(men) a toy that is going to take an hour to assemble and/or put stickers on. Motors and batteries are great too. And then your gift to yourself is watching them time travel back to their youth. Even better when they have kids to do it with. Chances are it'll sit on a shelf collecting dust after day 1, but just try and throw it out.
Lego is expensive these days. It always was, but it seems to be getting worse.
I've always thought that the dollar value of christmas gifts you got as a kid was equivalent to the amount of money you managed to obtain as a kid per year.... I doubt many kids prior to early teens gets more than a few hundred dollars a year they can spend on their own. The magic of christmas would be re-experienced as an adult if you got gifts equal to your annual earnings each December 25th! :)
I love your disclaimer. I also always preface everything with "I'm barely an expert in my field, so take this next thing I'm about to say about this broader, unrelated topic with a grain of salt."
It's amazing how male RUclipsrs don't feel the need to use those disclaimers.
Citation: I am a male, making broad claims about RUclipsrs, with a levels of confidence not at all backed up by my actual level of expertise. 🤦♂️
@@GSBarlev
yeah, no, I hear men and male youtubers make such disclaimers all the time. I think it's just an intelligence thing (dumb people tend to think they know everything, while smart people understand the underlying complexity and thus are more doubtful).
We've been doing secret santa between the adult members in the family (9 people) for a few years and it's made gift giving much better, because when it's just the one person that you know pretty well it's easy to get a gift that makes some sense, and you can spend a bit more time or money than if you were getting something for everyone. There's a wish list so you can get the specific thing requested or something else if you have a good idea. We tried a year of no gifts for adults but at least I missed it, because the gift exchange is really the only tradition we have left.
I hate buying gifts and the older people get the trickier they are to buy for and don't even get me started on secret Santa!!
You are bad, bad person :)
it wouldn't be difficult if you just asked the people. Like, my family hasn't been doing surprise presents since I was a small kid and I have never received a bad gift since the time I started forming memories because I always got exactly what I wanted as a gift. The custom of surprise gifting is why this entire video exists
@@miglek9613 If I ask what people want I'm usually met with a long pause and finally an "I don't really know" they might even add something like "surprise me". Trust me I've tried the asking approach and it's rarely useful.
Nice card, gift card to a local bookstore inside, thoughtful note. Done.
Nobody expects you to know what books they have read or want to read. It's slightly more specific than just cash or a gift card to amazon or some other wholesaler. Most bookstores have a bunch of other crap they can buy if they're not much into reading. They can use it in person or online in most cases. It's easy to re-gift.
In terms of the formula, the goal is to put all the effort into card selection and the thoughtful note. So you're leaning heavily on the thoughtfulness to carry you through to the sweet, sweet checking off of ritual social obligations.
@@rainbowkrampus That is well thought out and a good choice.
In my family (which is a large, festive one) the only people who exchange gifts are the ones who know each other well. If someone wants to be extra generous, they'll give everyone chocolate (cant go wrong), or a bookmark with a poem they've written, or a soapbar they made. It's very low commitment, and I'm broke so I only buy cheap gifts if there is a gift exchanging game going on.
Now that I think about it, where I'm from chocolate is a popular option for christmas, the stores even have themed boxes, so the efficiency problem already has a simple solution.
@@TheMysteryDriver slap some pretty packaging on them and they would make killer gifts!
God, I just realized I have been so autistic I truly ignored every social rule about gift giving in order to give gifts as effectively as possible
I remember specifically asking for plain socks on Christmas from my aunt when I was in my late teens/early twenties. I can use socks. I wear socks every day, some of them get holes so I need more. Socks were a great gift for me. I also remember hearing "Well, I can't always get you socks, what kind of present is that?".
It would've been a good one. But we can't have that, can we.
The best gifts are handmade, the second best gifts are consumables
Angela, you are so right! In fact I have been refusing to participate in Christmas for about thirty years now, for the very reasons you’re talking about. I really love the reactions that I get when I say to people “oh, I don’t do Christmas.”
Another banger this video is so good. I really do love the physics videos but I'm a data scientist by trade and really about 70% of it realistically flies over my head so these videos where you introduce us all to like the base level of something else you're interested in is always so entertaining. One of my favourite channels on youtube!!
In my close family, we never give gifts. We have a meal together, sometimes go for pizza, sometimes a movie. Essentially, we just enjoy our time together.
In my family for decades only kids get gifts .the adults gather and have dinner . that is all.
It is a nice tradition.
When i started living in North America for the first time i saw adults get gifts on christimas .it was really weird .
what age did the kids stop being kids and stop receiving gifts
This is what we have been doing for a while as well. My daughter is the oldest at 15, and I'm sure her grandparents will continue to buy he stuff/give her money for Christmas and her birthday. I just buy her things when she needs/wants them when I feel I can afford it. She wanted a new phone for Christmas (which she kind of needed anyway) so I bought it for her and gave it to her already. Seems silly to wait another 4 weeks when I already had it.
@@zbsz92in my family, the age is 21-22, and even then, it's only because they're poor and need us to chip in for tech purchases. 😂 We'll occasionally gift adults things that were specifically requested, or consumables/necessities that we know the person will use, but that's it.
@@zbsz92 the toy and other things similar ended probably around 13 and after that is little bags with candy and fruits and most important money .so money was the gift .as my grandmother said I better give you money so you can buy things you like and need I have no idea what to buy for you .
where are you from?
Economics is a difficult field. Imagine trying to develop the laws of physics without being able to do controlled experiments.
i dont know, i've been able to get that jump-for-joy type feeling and reaction as an adult giving gifts to other adults. i mean, they dont usually literally jump, but the feeling is the same. the important thing here is the gifts are usually not just objects. things like personally annotated books we can discuss, hand-painted keychains each of us has, watercolor paintings of pictures we took, a homemade meal inspired by a series we both like, etc. with the exception of the annotated books, all of them take a few hours max. im not saying nothing in this is right, just that that gift giving feeling is very much possible is as an adult without much free time
well yea, it is a little ridiculous that everyone is acting like it isnt a fun and nice tradition to do a gift exchange every year. a gift can be bought, made, found, even regifted... there isnt much reason to cry foul over wasted money when the people who are spending stupid amounts of money on hit or miss gifts are probably the type of people who can afford to spend stupid amounts of money on random things and generally do it anyway. it isnt hard for a regular sensible person to give a gift at a reasonable cost
My favorite aunt just asked us what we wanted when we were little, it was great. Eventually she just started sending us checks. Zero waste. She gets me exactly what I want every single year, she's at the top of the gift accuracy leaderboard and it's not even close
years ago a rift formed in my student house over whether this is too rediculous of a way to do christmas presents. My housemate wanted some new jeans. He went to the shops, tried some on, bought them, brought them home, gave them to his parents, they gave him cash for them, then his parents wrapped them up, and then he upwrapped them on christmas day.
This is how my parents basically do gifts to each other
This book and most economist's ideas are like if a mathematician unironically published a book about how 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ... = -1/12 and stood by the equation.
we live in a society of bourbon smelling star wars tie wearers
Once I had my first full time job if there was something that I wanted which was less than $100 then I would buy it. At that point I asked people to stop buying me gifts. Took a long time for everyone to get on board with it. My mother was the final holdout and continued gifting me things I didn't want or need well into my thirties.
I got out of the buying cycle by taking up ceramics as a hobby. At the end of the year, I always had more pieces than I needed, and I would enjoy matching my quirky, not-so-professional mugs and dinnerware with the people in my life who appreciate handmade things.
I think there's a happy medium between asking someone what they want and giving it to them and guessing a gift based on experience, and that's just asking for a wish list. When giving a guft based on a wish list, the gift you give still feels like a gift because the receiver has no idea what thing(s) on the list you're going to choose. Things on the list often are vague too, so it's still your job to determine which version of a thing is right for their needs. In addition, you don't have to strictly follow the list. You can also notice a pattern and find something similar.
As for the question of "why doesn't the receiver buy things for themselves", the answer is that people are more likely to spend extra for gifts than they are for things for themselves. For example, I think music on vinyl is really neat, but I can never justify to myself paying extra when I can listen to the same music digitally. However, I still feel like that would be a meaningful gift to me, so I put it on my wishlist.
I agree that we shouldn't feel obligated to give gifts to 40 people, though. Getting a gift from a cousin or something kind of sucks because they're always kind of generic and then I feel bad for not giving them anything.
If you want to get out of the bad gift cycles, may I recommend getting together with your loved ones and all chipping in for a special shared experience?
We all contribute to a Christmas vacation fund yearly and use the money to do something together. Examples include going to an ice skating rink, laser tag, theme park, maybe traveling to the tropics. Whatever your budget is, it should be tailored to how much you money raise in the family. You get to create lasting memories doing something you normally don't do because of time or money. You bugget food into the experince too, so everyone gets good nutrition for that event. And no one has to figure out what to do with junk.
It’s not bad but perhaps not everyone wants to be part of the activity. In a sense your friends or family may be subsiding people who are enjoying the experience more.
My uncle has kept the tradition of coming up with an event and paying for it for years and it’s great which works because he has a lot of disposable income. It could also be a tradition to plan something together at Christmas but at that point it’s just planning to do something and to me that’s not related to giving gifts.
Still, it is a Christmas tradition I would prefer to the gift giving we have now.
@btarczy5067 That sounds wonderful. That's how it is for us. Some pay more, some pay less. We decide what to do as a group and tailor it to what funds we have, so no one is pressured to pay beyond their means.
Since it's about spending time with loved ones, we don't really complain about whether we got to do the exact thing we wanted.
Because that's not the point. Sometimes, we just get lawn games and have a picnic in the park. Sometimes, we do something really random that none of us have ever done. So we can all laugh at ourselves being untalented.
It's lovely and full of love. And much less pressure than presents.
My entire extended family has pretty much given up on buying gifts for each other haha, even within my immediate family its just like "yeah I'll bake a nice cake or get some expensive meat for dinner or something" because none of us need more OBJECTs
Five years ago I picked up online chess as a hobby so, that Christmas, I received 5 different chess boards as gifts.
I was left with two options to use these gifts: 1) regularly rotate which board I display in my tiny apartment (lame); 2) train my memory every day for 10 years and hold a mandatory-attendance blindfolded simultaneous exhibition match against everybody that bought me board
So far I've done neither but at least I have 5 years left on option 2
Giving stuff away doesn’t feel too bad. Also know as regifting. There’s groups on Facebook that are into that.
I guess I forgot chess sets that are for public use or sets that are artsy gimmicks. Don't get your friend a giant chess set. Maaaaaybe get them the 4D chess set from Star Trek but maybe ask first. Don't get them a chess set to take to the park. Maaaaaybe get them a chess set table being thrown out by a coffee shop but definitely ask first. Don't 3d print them a spherical chess set. Maaaaybe carve them a piece from their favorite without asking.
Being good at simuls isn't contingent on remembering each boards position. It's moreso about being such a strong player (or sufficiently more strong than your opponents) that you're able to accurately select from the best moves in *any* given position.
This is why I’m such a huge advocate of food gifts. “That’s not a gift” you say, “you’re just grocery shopping for people” not if you do it right! There’s so many cooking ingredients and food items that I’d love to have but just cannot justify the cost of without an occasion. Fancy olive oil, fancy cheese, saffron, rare spices, all great gifts to me. This also has the problem of only working well for people you know pretty well, but I think it at least mitigates some waste.
32:58 But that IS gift giving! At least in my family. Everyone makes a wishlist about 1-2 month before christmas and we've got groupchats for each person where we (everyone except the person whose wishlist we're discussing) communicate, who bought / made what for the person. That way we only give things that are actually wanted and we don't accidentally give double gifts. Unfortunately our extended family isn't in on that and they do sometimes get us gifts that aren't particularly liked, but in that case, trading is explicitly allowed and encouraged.
Why do gifts NEED to be surprises? Is this some american culture thing that I don't get?
Maybe! I mostly only get wishlist gifts for my parents - my friends and extended family get care packages of homemade sweets and hot cocoa mix - but we all agreed 'no surprises' about the time I was old enough to give gifts myself, and people keep being shocked and baffled when I explain this because "it's no fun if it's not a surprise!". No, actually, it's more fun if it's not a surprise, because I'm anticipating getting something I actually want!
I’ve been looking for a comment that challenges her definition of “gift,” and after far too many finger swipes, I’ve arrived at your comment. Congrats. I guess in the population of people that watch her videos and feel compelled to leave a comment, there’s just not that many who find her definition far too narrow.
This video was awesome. I'm an economics undergrad focusing on behavioral economics and I can absolutely relate to how excited about talking about these ideas you get around the 37 minute mark. It's just... so fascinating to apply scientific analysis to human financial and decision behavior and end up with observations like this. I love all of your takes on this topic, and completely agree with your analysis. Gift giving in the way most people do it is so weird!
To be honest, my extended family mostly stops giving each other gifts around the 18yo. mark, so it was really interesting to be reminded how prevalent this type of gift giving is while seeing an economic lens applied to it. I don't have close coworkers or anything, and I usually just offer my friends artistic commissions if we exchange gifts at all, so it's easy to forget that bad gifts (and I agree that they're terrible) are way more common. It definitely has to do with the fact that we're Jewish and celebrating Chanukah, but yeah. I always kind of wonder who is buying the box sets of hot sauce and beard oils from Buzzfeed articles, but it's true that people must be. Both the Planet Money clips and your breakdown were absolutely captivating.
I'll definitely be watching the full Planet Money episodes next. Thank you for making these video essays, they're always so engaging and insanely interesting. You have a gift for science communication, and I love your sense of humor and how you balance it with the current of horrifying data about how humanity lives under capitalism that underlies this conversation.The beats with the headlines shown really get at how it feels to research these topics. I'm looking forward to whatever topic is up next, and so so happy you decided to dip into a field that I care so much about. Merry Christmas!
I’ve noticed in the progress of your video so far is that the essence of the quality of emotion attached to the gifts is tied far more to the time given than the currency spent. 25:43 my grandmother was a painter on porcelain and she made dolls for the girls in the family and I was the only boy for a long time and she painted a China plate for me and put on images of all the things I liked that she painted and she put on all the things from an era a generation before mine so it looked kinda wrong but she made it into a clock and that’s a cool gift I got at probably age 10
As someone with an economics degree, I find the idea that gifts should just be cash or cash-equivalents bizarre. You can account for exactly how much you give to others and how much you get back, being able to quantifiably balance gifts like a checking account leads you to think about whether you net gained or lost wealth. If I give someone 100 dollars, and they give me 100 dollars, nothing happened; and if we give each other different amounts then it can lead to embarrassment because the monetary discrepancy can be used as an easy method to measure and judge the feelings of others.
My complaint in calling Economics a “hard science” is that it treats people as if they are just variables in an equation, or beings whose behavior is perfectly rational and predictable. Reducing human behavior down to complex math equations doesn’t make sense. Like, foundational ideas like “barter economies” have been proven to be myths, and yet they still serve as the rationale for modern economic theory.
I think she meant *difficult* science in that context.
Hard science in the sense it can be conducted experimentally and is hypothesis/data driven. This as opposed to something like philosophy.
Economics is a social science, and therefore a soft science.
ya but the weird thing is that on very large scales humans basically do act like pure variables. like once you're looking at how a country full of people act when a new thing comes out of the news says a thing you can super accurately predict a ton of things and most of the time it's right. that's not to say economic theories are totally fool proof but the extent to which humans can be modeled by an equation is unexpectedly high
@@iansalinas412 Until something changes, which economics rarely predicts. Economics has a consistent problem of basing its analyses in the specific reality of the present and the relatively recent past, because they are what can be quantified, but the conditions underpinning that dataset are socially and historically constituted, and therefore beyond the bounds of 'hard science'. It then uses that faulty grounding to make bad extrapolations towards a universal that doesn't exist, because social circumstances change over time (sometimes very quickly). Contemporary economics can make reasonable predictions about a bunch of things for the relatively near future, and if it was perfected it could probably make better predictions about a bunch more, but eventually those non-scientific factors will change to the point where current theories, however comprehensive, will be next to useless. For that reason it is by no means a hard science. Protons cannot get together and decide to ignore gravity, but people could get together and decide to ignore property. One is a fundamental law of nature, the other is a social construct.
That myopic economic formula sounds more like a love letter to capitalist philosophy. We live in a capitalist society that exrudes value from labor, effort, and everything else. The system encourages us to consume not just for ourselves, but for others. The purpose of the altruistic gift in society is not for it to be analyzed as a line item for its economic value, it is not meant to be a commodity. The purpose of the altruistic gift is to reinforce social bonds within society, not to reinforce transactional relationships. Capitalism utilizes this in order to create more "value" from things that aren't necessarily ethical to commodify.
You might find the book The Gift by Marcel Mauss of interest.
So yes I agree, don't buy people stuff that is ultimately going in the trash. Anti-consumption is a good thing. But so is not being an ass-Scrooge towards your relations because you're keen on acting smart.
Thank you for the video. I love giving and receiving gifts, but have basically checked out of Xmas because it is has sucked the spontaneous joy out of all of it.
Hot Take: Gift giving is great if you have friends with expertise you don’t. For instance, I know almost nothing about painting but kinda enjoyed watercoloring once or twice. Asked for water color supplies and my mother in law (who has been recreationally painting for the better part of a decade) knew exactly what to get with no work on my part!
Plus, this opens the door for bonding as that invites the gifter to introduce the giftee to the hobby!
Thank you acollierastro, I am now buying my wife a beard trimming kit this Christmas 👍 my marriage has been saved
Brilliant, thank you! This video is why I'm so wild about your channel. It's been a long time since I've been in such enthusiastic agreement with someone, watching and thinking yes, yes, YES!
Edited to add: As other commenters have said, this video is such a gift! Perfect and completely unexpected!
For creative types, if one has the time, handmade gifts are the cheapest and most effective gifts one can give someone. Otherwise, the best thing to do is to think about the person closest to oneself to give a good gift.
Even shitty handmade gifts are fun in their own way.
Bad handmade gifts can be a burden too.
Unlike bad store bought carp you feel compelled to keep it, thus costing you valuable storage space for eternity.
Come to think of it- that's the gift I'd most appreciate - storage space.... perhaps with a bit of time too.
I sometimes did get a really heartfelt reaction from giving gifts because it was an "I didn't even know this existed" situation. The one i remember most is when i gave a girl friend of mine, who always folded little paper boats when she was bored and would then just give it the next person she saw, a boat in that shape except I made it from a sheet of stainless steel by bending, welding, cutting and polishing. But as said in the video that was made by me from an idea I had and I didn't even look up if you could buy it.
yea so for christmas I very much like the idea of secret santa because it limits the amount of people you have to think about giving a gift to; Better still IMO is DIY secret santa in which everyone just does something he's good in and think about how the giftee would enjoy something made with your skill.
This video was the only gift I needed. Thank you. 😊
What I've learned from this is that people are just bad at giving gifts (or they have a really stupid definition of gifts). I have received maybe two bad gifts in my life.
But also, who the heck says a gift has to be something the person didn't ask for? I've never once thought that or been told that.
Doesn't everyone just ask for a bunch of stuff they want or need and receive a small portion of that list (and maybe sometimes get something you mentioned you need once, and someone gets it for you after you forgot)? That's how it's always gone in my family.
Also, no one is forcing people to buy gifts for 40 different people (whether that is an exaggeration or not. That's insane). The most I've ever done is give gifts to my immediate family (maybe because I don't talk to anyone that frequently), and that was the same for my parents when I was a kid; they never once thought about giving gifts to relatives (especially since we live nowhere near them. No one cares.
Maybe it's just because I've always been really stingy and never buy stuff unless I need it to survive, so I actually appreciate getting things I want from people (also, I despise internet shopping, so I do it as little as possible; and really love physical shopping). The only things I actually buy for myself are things no one would ever buy for me, or things I would never ask someone to buy for me, even if they did know.
I'm glad I'm not living in the cynical gift giving world, because I'm cynical about enough stuff already (especially internet shopping and the internet in general).
(And seriously, people are doing White Elephants wrong too? Every one I've been to has been a bunch of funny garbage that is meant to be to give a good laugh.)
I hate Christmas more and more each year, but not because of the general gift-giving environment in my home. I just hate all of the capitalist garbage around the holidays and the grating music that starts in October, when it should start only in December (when I actually enjoy it), or at least right after Thanksgiving.
It's funny that I'm the one that hates Christmas now, but appreciates gift-giving as a concept (thankfully, I do love Christmas again this year). But also, I only really ever want a load of books, so I might just be easy to give gifts to, since I talk about books all the time.
It's almost like humans are more complex than one single box. So maybe gifts are bad for some people, but not everyone. Of course. Because it would be stupid and infuriating if that wasn't the case.
I will say, you don't need to get loads of gifts for a person every year. It could even be some sort of experience that you all enjoy together as a couple or family. Getting gifts for everyone in your extended family is just about the stupidest thing I've heard, so just focus on the people that actually matter in your everyday life.
Within a year, it is likely that they will think of at least one thing they want to do or have that they would not normally buy themselves. And not buying a gift is always an option too. You can make them their favorite meal, or spend time baking, or something like that. You don't just have to buy kitschy garbage if you don't know what else to get them.
I'm sure all these smart people can think of something, just one thing, to get someone they love and spend time with.
Thanks. I've worked in offices plenty in my career. When they did the inevitable 'Secret Santa' crap (which I will always hate), I made it clear that all I wanted was a gift card to a book store. Any book store. That's it. Men could have a closet full of soap-on-a-rope, bad aftershave, ugly belts, & socks all in the wrong colors. But we systematically get rid of it. Except for the ugly sweaters. We're required by law to keep those in the back of the closet. Our wives will say, "Why don't you wear that cute sweater crazy aunt Cindy got?!". We say, "It's right here, but I'm not wearing it. If you try & force me to, I'm not going at all, so bite me". Isn't that a fun game? No. tavi.
I think it’s gotten a little better, but for women it was always Bath & Body Works (and similar) lotions etc. I used to get positively SNOWED with random gift sets at Christmas, I had so many in my closet. A boring, no-energy gift, never the scents an individual would prefer, and as a woman, a little minimizing. (Like zero chance I’d get anything cool or funny or weird bc I was a female so everyone knew just buy her Bath & Body Works! lol)
I keep one bottle of unscented Eucerin for any body lotion needs I might have at any given time lol.
I love this video.
My family and extended family know that I don’t buy gifts for birthdays and Christmas… but I do periodically find just the right gift for someone, and give it to them on whatever random day is convenient. They always appreciate that special and thoughtful gift given from only love rather than obligation. THAT gift has real value.
Apparently the whole idea is to trade toys and recipes but everyone forgot that and use it as a means to flex their annual salary
I'm not sure if I agree with your ending (pre credits). During your introduction you described a gift as something given freely where you don't care what they do with it. Considering this, I think it's perfectly acceptable to give people "exploratory" gifts.
For example, I had never played competitive card games before. My best friend is REALLY into Magic: The Gathering. He says "I know you're not going to spend the time and money to get into something so complicated you're not sure you'll like, so I went ahead and put together a deck that I think will be simple and fun for a beginner". And he was right. I didn't keep up with it as a hobby, but I did have a lot of fun gaming with him and a few other friends. And I learned a new hobby.
Sometimes a gift can be a good way to expose someone to something you'll think they'll like but wouldn't get out of their comfort zone and do. As long as it's given freely, IE with the understanding they might not like it / use it / sell it.
BTW my son in law is a bourbon snob and has won many beard contest, yes there are beard contest so thanks for the ideas.
Honestly the one type of gift i felt i value the most, is that random gift from a random day that someone got just because it reminded them of me. Because even if the thing is small it gives a clear message that the guy is always thinking of you even if it's tangential or unintentional, it's showing that they care about you and your interests
Wait, do people in other countries not ask their friends and family what they want gifted???? Like, of course you're getting bad gifts if people gift stuff without asking what you want, that's absolutely insane as an idea
When people ask me what I want for christmas, I almost always end up saying I don't know. If I want/need something enough for it to be worth money to me I already bought it.
That's how it works a lot of the time, yes. They're supposed to be a surprise. Which, y'know, explains why there are so many unwanted gifts.
Yeah, around here (Georgia, USA), A Christmas gift can be seen as a challenge of how well you know someone. You should be so intuitive and considerate that you can read your friend's and family's minds, buying them the perfect gift that not even they know that they want, but it is so perfect. It's ridiculous.
At least in my family everyone asks what people want and i live in texas, so i think its more of a person to person thing than being country specific.
My sister in law always had an Amazon wish list. And no money of her own. She very much enjoyed other people buying her things.
Hume's guillotine would like to have a chat with the guy claiming inefficiency suggests gifting is bad