It was my friend’s landmark birthday, as we now call these events. We live in times when we need an excuse to celebrate. Dressing up, meeting people, singing, dancing, clicking pictures and videos, and eating good food is a preferred choice to spend one’s weekend. These enjoyable experiences notwithstanding, the question of an appropriate gift remains tricky.
Buying something for another person has never been as tough as it is now. Our friend expected us to do something ‘nice’. She had told us earlier that a gift is a thoughtful deed that only dear friends and close relatives are capable of. It should be something that one strongly desires, but is unable to acquire or achieve. Given this framework, we chatted away on the WhatsApp group, to no avail.Women have a pet peeve when it comes to gifting. People get stuff for the house—appliances, artefacts, crockery and cutlery—as gifts for a woman’s birthday or anniversary. How impersonal and patriarchal, we would argue. Getting personal gifts is even tougher. I once received, from a friend, an expensive perfume that I hated and I haven’t told her that I gave it away to someone who liked it. Gifts circulate, saving money as they go, if I must uphold a virtue of the act.
Buying clothes, bags, ties, shoes, pins, watches, jewellery are all unlikely to work, as there is always a personal preference of colour, design, material and brand. After much thought, I have concluded that gifting is a wasteful endeavour. Those who know me also know that I give or accept nothing. My husband disapproves of my candid act of returning stuff that is gifted by others, but I argue that I have clarified my position several times. To him it is a matter of great relief that I don’t expect him to buy me gifts.
I argue that gifting is one of those wasteful rituals that we have perpetuated, but we live in denial and hate to admit it. Our personal finances would benefit from getting rid of this vain pursuit of trying to please others with an object. Insisting that the other accept, appreciate and use something that one has unilaterally bought, is also an act of tyranny. Sounds drastic? Think about it.
We subject ourselves to the need to give and take gifts for various reasons. How does one go and meet someone empty-handed, ask my friends. I confess to having done just that for the past 40 years, and I have lived to tell the tale. My circle of friends has only grown. We don’t have to reduce relationships to transactions. We can believe in the generosity and goodness of the world, and accept that those who fed us and those of us who ate are happy people who will spread happiness. Spending time with one another, when we could have done something else, is a precious gift. We made the other feel wanted, cared for and respected. All priceless gifts.
Sometimes, gifts are seen as a way to remember others. My mother bought me a stainless steel pressure cooker when it was first introduced. It has travelled with me to all the homes I moved into, and not because I remember her when I use it; it would be a shame if I needed a cooker to think of a woman who meant so much to me. Our memories don’t need objects to survive. We all know how objects we got as gifts, that we can’t keep or throw, end up crowding our homes.
Some believe that being obligated is a bad thing and that we have to exchange objects and make it even. Someone invited us to an event, and we passed on an envelope with token money, eating the meal with a sense of entitlement. The account is even. Think about how the world would be if we were to keep accounts for everyone who came into our lives and repaid everything we thought we owed.
Micheal Sanders would list for us the many things money can’t buy, and the many joys we would kill by bringing money into the picture. We would be a better society if we believed that living with a sense of gratitude made us better people. Try as much as we like, we can’t repay the goodness we receive as we live. Think for a moment about how our celebrations would be if we did not need any of this quid pro quo. What we do to others would be an expression of gratitude, and the recipients would pass the goodness forward, instead of measuring generosity with a token gift.
If we don’t take a gift, won’t others take us for granted? If we don’t buy a gift, won’t others think we are stingy? If we bought a lot, won’t they call us reckless? A lot of time and energy is lost trying to figure out what the other is doing, what the motivations are, and what they must instead do. What if we simply focused on what we do? We allocate our money the way we think is best, and we take along people who we believe matter to us. If we realise that someone is trying to piggyback on our personal wealth, we decide to take action that suits us. Isn’t that simple?
We fall into the trap of spending to impress, gifting to gain favour, and our actions cater to the impression we like to create about our wealth. These are clearly one-sided actions that don’t provide the opportunity to express a contrarian view and stay true to what really matters. We drown in the cesspool of social acceptance, appropriate behaviour and unbroken ritual. We can prevent wastage of misallocated wealth if we do not subscribe to the notion of giving and gifting as ‘tokens of love’.
As for the friend in question, a weekend trip to her dream destination, a special meal cooked by friends, eaten at the top of her favourite trekking destination, to the sound of birds and the beauty of the morning sun, was the gift we friends gave. That we woke up at 4 a.m. to make it happen is an act of love. We are sure we saved her the disappointment over the colour of the expensive designer bag we might otherwise have bought. Gifts are overrated. Both giver and taker suffer and are mostly disappointed.
The Author IS CHAIRPERSON, CENTRE FOR INVESTMENT EDUCATION AND LEARNING