Rethinking Gift-Giving in the Digital Age
Some holiday recommendations.
Alright so let’s just get it out there…I’m not buying a lot of gifts this year. Not “in this economy”, that is not to say that I am not giving gifts. Let’s just say that my account balances have turned me into a conscientious objector to the current state of consumerism. I am by no means broke…but I am feeling broken by late-stage digital crapitalism.
I never want for any of the most basic needs…my biggest struggle most Christmases and birthdays is giving my wife any clue of what I want, because I have so many toys and whatnot. This is not pass judgement on the more consumer-minded of you, but if you are looking for great buys, Billy’s Gadget Guide already has you well covered.
This blog was started on the idea of relating our changing world back to pop culture so please allow me to kick off the perspective shift with a call back to Notorious B.I.G.’s 1994 iconic song Juicy
No heat, wonder why Christmas missed us
Birthdays was the worst days
With all of that said, I wanted to share wanted to share a bit of a ‘eureka!’ moment that I had while on a walk this past Saturday. While I know that correlation and causation are more often than not, more disconnected than we humans like to acknowledge. My first gift to you, dear reader is this: Walk more, reading those two words a year ago, I would have rolled my eyes at the wanky “productivity hacking” seemingly non-advice that this would appear to be at first glance. But it really is more than that, in any given week, I have more moments of clarity in a single walk, than all the hours in front of my computer combined.
Added bonus: I save about 10% annually on my supplemental health insurance just because my average step count exceeds 10,000 per day. But forget the unit economics, there is real value in “puttering about” as Jeff Bezos would call it. It also pays off in compounding ways. Maybe by the end of this post you will disagree, as one of the moments of ambulatory inspiration is what led to this very entry.
I was listening to my new favorite podcast. It is called 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, when I say favorite, I mean favorite. In true Jordan fashion, I’ll share the link an episode covering one of my favorite bands:
The writing style is a strange combination of Scott Galloway’s tough self love and introspection, John Mullaney’s ability to see the absurd in everyday things, and Dan Carlin’s epic, yet granular storytelling. The host Rob Harvilla could easily fall into the trap of leaning on nostalgia to fill his usual 90-minute run time, but he never cheapens his work by doing so. The first episode that I listened to was on Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence, a song that was beautifully covered one year ago to the day as I write this, at my wedding.
My wife Houston and I are fortunate to be surrounded by so many creative people in our lives, one of those people is a Hong Kong musician that daylights in the tech world:
We held a music festival wedding that included 5 bands and 4 DJs…I wasn’t exaggerating about being surrounded by creativity. While every single act was special in their own right, Joya went above and beyond simple gigging and playing her amazing songs like: For What’s It’s Worth, Credit, and If She Ever Goes. She indulged me on a few special requests to have certain songs covered, for the first dances between my (then) new wife and myself.
The first of which was 夢中人 by Faye Wong.
In an attempt to get this post back on the rails, I will get back to my ‘eureka!’ moment, but I swear it all related. Harvilla had just spent nearly an hour and half playing my heart strings like a yard sale bass with this absolute banger of an episode:
I don’t really expect anyone to actually go through all of the media shared in this post but I swear to you if you do, you are in for a real treat.
At about 18 minutes in Rob gives a bit of background on the fact that 夢中人 is, in essence a Cantonese cover of The Cranberries smash hit Dreams. Suddenly, mid-stride the synapses started firing: if I am finding so much creative inspiration from this podcast, surely my creative friends would too. That is when I decided to stop and write a little note to Joya to give this specific episode a listen, and the previously mentioned Enjoy the Silence episode; as she also serenaded us at our wedding with Martin Gore’s words when she covered it:
All I ever wanted, all I ever needed is here in my arms.
It was only fitting.
We chatted for a bit, and then fleshed out some Christmas gathering plans. That’s when it hit me: this is how I can give some thoughtful Christmas gifts and still maintain my status as a conscientious objector. That’s ~800 words for me to self-congratulate on the idea that I will use a few hundred more words to share with you.
Our throughly enshittified subscriptions-for-everything state of technology, means we are paying so much just to under-consume the glut of content shoved into our faces from all directions. But one of my biggest complaints has been that so much of our online discourse lacks really important context. I have resolved to be part of the solution to that problem. As such, I am spending less time sharing the interesting stuff that I come across as mass posts on social networks.
Instead, I am making an effort this holiday season to curation and trying to thoughtfully target my sharing to individuals. Last week, I was writing Christmas cards to my family and I couldn’t help but notice how bad my handwriting was. Had it always been this bad? Has living almost entirely online caused some sort of muscle amnesia for penmanship? or was the answer somewhere in the middle?
Either way, writing the cards while important, was not enjoyable to me. I wanted to show the addressees that I care, but the physical act sucked. Conversely, already awash with dopamine and serotonin from the Zombie episode of 60 Songs, I still felt so much additional…joy from the aforementioned conversation with my friend.
Rather than handwriting just a few notes, I am thinking back to meaningful events this past year…though nothing will compete with the first dance at my wedding…and then writing to friends and other important people in my life little notes, usually via WhatsApp and sharing wonderful little bits of content that I believe they will find value in.
In a few particularly magical instances, I get to share the work of people I know personally and get twice the value out of a series of action that is just a small bit of time out of my day. If you have made it this far, you are already getting some of that magic in the form of Billy and Joya.
I hope this post inspires you to do your own holiday recommendations, and maybe just maybe this post might be one of them. Heres to a happy and healthy, and slightly less enshittified 2025 to you and your family.