This month as I, and the rest of the world, have conducted the rounds of shopping for Christmas and Hanukkah and the holidays in general, I’ve been thinking more and more about what it means to give a good gift. What can I possibly buy that they don’t already have? Can I think of something that hasn’t already appeared on one of their algorithmically generated lists of “because you liked this, you may like . . .”? What kind of clutter can I add to somebody’s undersized New York City apartment that can possibly rival the clutter they’ve chosen for themselves?
I’ve found myself thinking of an assignment regularly given by a colleague of mine at The Catholic University of America, Brandon Vaidyanathan. Vaidyanathan teaches a course on beauty—what it is, what it means, what it’s for—and one of his signature assignments is to send his students to an art gallery in search of a “gift.”
Vaidyanathan’s students—like most college-age students—are accustomed to thinking about their own preferences: what they like or don’t like, what resonates with them. Vaidyanathan charges them with locating a particularly beautiful piece of art, while emphasizing that they should be looking for something that suits not their own ideas about beauty, but ideas they’ve heard expressed by one of their classmates. The aim is to find a “gift” for that classmate: to find a piece they’d like, take a photograph of it, and write a letter explaining why the student chose it.
The premise of Vaidyanathan’s assignment—inspired by a similar exercise developed by the writer Chris Everett—is that when we pay attention to beauty not for our own sake, but with the tastes and needs and longings of another in mind, we’re able to more clearly see the object in question. When we experience the world as gift-givers, rather than consumers, it is easier to see what is beautiful, or what is meaningful. And what Brandon’s assignment makes clear is the degree to which a good gift is not only about the object itself—but about the time we’ve spent moving through the world with someone else in mind.
This year, as I have previously written, I’ve committed to living offline as much as possible. All my devices are in gray scale; I only use a smartphone when I’m traveling; blockers allow me a strict 15 minutes a day on social media. And I’ve challenged myself, likewise, to do all of my holiday shopping in person, avoiding the barrage of promotional emails and targeted advertisements and product listicles constantly demanding my attention.
This isn’t merely because of my desire to avoid diverting my dollars to Amazon. Rather, it’s because one of the only ways to resist an era that’s constantly trying to make us want things is to reawaken the pleasure of directionless desire. At its best, searching for gifts in person is one of the few forms of consumption that allows for spontaneity—and subsequently intimacy.
This is not a process that can be optimized. It’s a process that depends on the sort of joyful surprise I experience when I stumble across something that reminds me of somebody I love. It’s finding fridge magnets from the Polar Museum in Cambridge, England, for two of my friends exploring polar regions. It’s seeing a pair of purple woven earrings from a flea market, for the friend who loves that color more than I have ever loved anything. It’s noticing a vintage prayer bench left on the curb, which I promptly handed over to an Anglo-Catholic friend.
That joyful surprise can feel like an act of resistance to the virtual economy, which commodifies our desires and reduces us into consumer profiles.
Gifts like these are also a reminder that, to those that love us, we can’t be easily flattened or reduced into spending patterns or consumer demographics. The internet may know that I am a 34-year-old woman who spends too much money on vintage clothing, and therefore tantalize me with advertisements for high-end Edwardian reproduction shoes. But it takes a dear friend to know that I’d love to pair those shoes with a simple canvas tote bag sporting a silly line drawing of a raccoon.
It is, of course, possible to find weird things on the internet—eBay, in particular, retains this sense of randomness. But online marketplaces limit spontaneity—although they are very good at giving us an illusion of what we want. Amazon’s algorithm knows I like melancholy Central European novels. I can click on an Etsy item once, and it can follow me perpetually around the internet. But the best gifts are things we would never have bought for ourselves, either because they are too indulgent or something we had no idea existed.
They tell us something about how people see us. Good gift-giving is less about an object than it is about time and focus, the hours spent browsing a bookstore or a holiday market with someone else in mind. It is the giving of attention—what the philosopher Simone Weil once called “the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
We’re not telling you what to buy, but The Free Press did put together a pretty great gift guide. You can read it here.