Attack of the Gift Guides
Shopping will not save us. But that doesn't stop us from trying.
There is a glass paperweight that lives on my desk — a round, saffron orb set against a grainy black background, like a navel orange suspended in the night sky. The word “courage” is emblazoned across it.
I bought it as a gift to myself nearly twenty years ago. I was out of work, unsure of what came next. I remember the heft of it in my hand — solid, substantial, the sort of item an established person might place upon their established-person desk. The power of the word courage as it looped around my mind.
The paperweight was $50, a ludicrous amount to spend on an unnecessary object in the face of unemployment. I had no papers in need of weighing. I didn’t even have a desk. But there was something reassuring about the memento, simultaneously soothing and aspirational. Gaze upon me and remember how far you’ve come, it seemed to say. Gaze upon me and trust in where you’re going. And so, I bought it.
It has the distinction of being a purchase that proved memorable, increasing in (sentimental) value over the years. It is the exception.
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Just when it seemed like the volume of election takes might very well kill us, in marched the gift guides. I picture them entering to The Nutcracker Suite, pirouetting into my inbox and across my targeted ads, leaping about my psyche.
Maybe it’s just me, but this year feels more relentless than ever. I’ve seen gift guides from brands and sites and individuals, boasting new and secondhand wares. There are lists for every price point, every person, and always — wink, wink — “a little something for yourself.”
Sometimes, they’re broken down by personality. The entertainer, the adventurer, the homebody. The bookworm, the collector, the home chef. The descriptions are as tantalizing as the items, each a shiny new persona, a little escape hatch to a neatly defined way of being.
If you published a gift guide this week, or if you shopped them — if you eagerly clicked like a hyena with a credit limit, hungry for distraction, please know that I harbor no judgment. I did it, too.
I’ve been thinking about this topic because I get it. I also want to get over it. Shopping is capitalism’s siren song, its dangling carrot of distraction. When things feel overwhelming, when we’re momentarily aware that we are the proverbial frog in the pot —the temperature slowly increasing around us until, oops, we’re cooked — it’s all too human to reach for something soothing. Substances or doom scrolling or Hallmark movies or escapist fiction or stuff. When we can’t opt out, we can add to cart.
Multiple friends have reported that the stress of the last few weeks left them “in the mood to shop,” which is a most curious phrase. No matter how many wheels of emotions one consults — including the complicated ones with feelings like inadequate and detestable — “shopping” is not a mood.
But it is a little hit of dopamine, the illusion of productivity, the promise of life-after-purchase. If it feels like the pendulum swung from apocalypse to shop-ocalypse, it’s not a coincidence.