I dropped the shield and told her how it fills me with anxiety, how it's a transaction and the exact opposite of the free gift of God's grace, how behind every gift there is the painful pull of obligation of indeterminate size, shape, character, or duration. How it's a mechanism for control.
She asked me if I ever gift gifts to my children, and I told her the truth. I let my wife handle the gifts.
Date: October 30th, 2026 12:49 PM Author: great moniker
the guy from Into the Wild (when he still was living at home) declared to his whole family he would no longer give or receive gifts. i constantly fantasize about doing that
Soo cr. I took an intro to anthropology class in college (before realizing how crazy stupid that line of study was) and we had to read these overly verbose ethnographies of people from Papua New Guinea and the northwest Pacific and they had the concept of potlatch as an alternative to war. Instead of fighting and killing your neighbor, you'd just give lavish gifts and everyone would come over to your side and with the extra status you could become the big chief. But that doesn't mean the gift of potlatch was magnanimous.