a gift guide for the eternal peon

hey YOU! are you a representative of the bottom 99% and need gift ideas to plague your loved ones storage lockers with? have you not yet purchased your friends, family, mating partners, cell mates, and upper management their fourth annual gift? look no further, as this guide will enlighten you with never before seen SLOP for you to indirectly send STRAIGHT to someone's local landfill!

ok, you probably got the idea by now. now this isnt some kind of "oh frex is just cranky and hates fun" sort of thing, and the fact that i even need to preface that sucks :(). in fact, i love gifts! getting a thoughtful present from someone that cares about you is wonderful and likewise stumbling across/specially making the perfect gift for a friend really makes me :D. what i HATE however, is this perverse gifting culture that for some reason we are morally obligated to follow or we are for some reason "fun haters" or "a scrooge". and uh,,, warning! this post got a bit gloomier than i expected it to, so uhhhh... beware that! :/ anyways, what i actually want to talk about is how...

santa claus is a secret agent of the capitalist elite deepstate.

:p

i cant lie, christmas is my favourite holiday (but that feeling is fleeting). im not religious whatsoever, but my german mom inundated me with her country's glorious culture of going way over the top for christmas... at least she did when we were younger, her getting a second job later on really burned her out of doing anything like that (yippee, ever encroaching poverty! :DDD). when youre young, people always seem to insinuate that the gifts are the most important part of the holiday and thats mainly what the kids are interested in and yeah, as a kid that probably was what was on my mind 99% of the time :(). but looking back, the solid month of generally more positive vibes in the house probably did more for my mental wellbeing than the single hit of dopamine from opening presents i would go on to get bored of within a couple of days.

now im an adult i suppose and im living off on my own. the cool part of christmas is entirely dependant on whether i have the energy to do all the stuff my mom used to (which is usually not the case :( but i oftentimes will make christmas cookies!), yet the gift exchanging still remains! and worse yet its primarily all just gifts for adults who already have too much stuff they dont need... like genuinely what is the point?!? i used to struggle so much looking for gifts for my family because they both had everything they needed, consistsently were disappointed when getting something they dont need, and would get upset if they didnt get a gift at all. considering the fact that we come from poverty and still arent far from it now, theres no possible winning outcome! @_@ even for myself theres hardly anything i actually want, and getting gifted something i have no use for is just a hassle (do i just immediately toss it out or keep it around to be nice to the person that gave it to me). nowadays i just abandoned the concept of mandated gift giving altogether, and WOW its tough. not because "boohoo, i dont get any gifts", but because every single person i talk to about it says something along the lines of "come on, dont be so boring" or the dreaded "lighten up scrooge". i know that Typical Normal People are averse to the idea that other people can have differing ideologies, but i wasnt expecting NOT wanting other people to buy you stuff to elicit such negative opinions. im still going to these christmas events and partaking in all the other Typical Normal Activities D:<<< !!!

its as if the spirit of christmas got laid off and some mckinsey goon swooped in to make everything worse. oh wait... thats actually not that far from what likely happened. everyone already knows that thing about the modern depiction of santa claus already being some advertising exec's wet dream come true, and hell even people who arent chronically online complain about how christmas is overcommercialised, but modern gift giving practices are so destructive for everything but corporations and we still feed into it!! theyre powerful enough that they convince even the most anti-christian of people to partake in their cruel game! a post-christmas society would find us insane for making such a big deal out a holiday where you strees for months to find the Perfect Garbage for someone, only to wrap it up in sheets of Garbage and exchange it for your own personalised Garbage Wrapped Garbage.

and this isnt me trying to say "stop buying anything and join me on the christmas despair train", because thats lame, people are allowed to have fun q-q. but like, you dont need to set these Price Minimums that show your true affection for people. just buying some tasty/indulgent food to feast on with everyone during the singular holiday is enough, thats the special occasion after all (bonus points if its locally made B)). as soon as youre gifting into the "days-worth" of snacks range though, it starts becoming a hassle. SIDE TANGENT THATS SORTA RELATED AND I FIND IT AMUSING SO IM PUTTING IT IN HERE: i did this with my family a few years ago with a little charcuterie board and some homemade fruit spreads. it was great and they loved it :D !!! but my family has this awful habit of not listening at all to my wishes and continues to get me gifts even though i repeatedly tell them that i hate getting presents (and then they proceed to be confused when im upset about it afterwards -___-). anyways, this cheeseboard idea seemed to signal to them "omg, frex hates gifts but bought cheese for us. they must want cheese!! :DDD" and 3 separate people decided to buy me 2 weeks of cheese and meats each next year ....... all was from the clearance shelf and expiring within a week or two : ( ). i hate wasting any food so i forced myself to use as much of it as possible,,, i couldnt look at cheese for the next 6 months without wanting to vomit. so uhh, yeah, just buy for the one special day! ^^

please tell me the birthdays are safe at least

NO, theyre just as bad. same as all the other stupid occasions that marketing teams make you want to buy garbage for. anniversaries, parents' days, valentines day, ive even seen rememberance day gifts being pushed. like yeah, still celebrate the people you appreciate, but scrambling to find them slop after your phone reminded you their Special Day is coming up doesnt really say much in the way of appreciation. usually the people that i appreciate in my life just float around in the void of my cranium, randomly crashing into the center of my atttention. i dont particularly care about some arbitrary date, im going to appreciate you whenever i want damnit. this usually manifests in just a random checkup, sending a little doodle/thing i made or found on the internet thats suited to them, or in RARE cases a purchased gift (it has to be something perfect for them though !!!). something something forced love isnt really love at all or something like that, some philosopher probably wrote a book on that but im not the sort to worship those nerds.

it seems as if this capitalism centered world has completely ruined how everyone approaches relationships (as well as a multitude of other things) and the basis of them have just become "Pay Your Subscription Dues Or You Dont Truly Care". and yeah, its pretty hard to do anything without partaking in capitalism nowadays but hey, dont let the marketing collective make you think its absolutely neccesary! every day youre hit with a barrage of advertisements that induce an urge to constantly spend. marketing is terrifying, the repeated microdoses of corporate affirmations seeps into our subconscious and aligns us with the way of their profits. it could be something like a jingle that stays wedged in your brain tissue, replacement of common vernacular, or even maybe the worldview that if you dont buy a thing you are a bad person...

its very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that just because we constantly are fed an idea of a practice being Appropriate, it must be true. we see it all the time with the extremist Pipelines that many people fall into on social media. the majority of content you see in the world sadly is funded by corporations, hellbent on making you desire their goods. try looking in ANY direction from where you are right now, chances are you will have at least one Brand Recognition Symbol in your view. and yeah, as im writing this it sounds EXTREMELY conspiratorial, i know, but with all the other atrocities these Corporate Entities commit to raise their profits, social engineering slots perfectly within. hell, once you get into environmentalism you learn a lot of the marketing techniques corpos are already using to distract the general public from their Malicious Proceedings. theyre extremely underhanded and almost impossible to recognise if you dont already expect it. its a lot more cost effective for them to spend millions to hide the bodies rather than to stop slaughtering their billion dollar cash cows.

... ok, that was getting a bit doom and gloomy

:c yeah i know... i wasnt expecting this post to go this way when i started, but writing out all my grievances with gift giving really riles me up i guess. its so hard nowadays to just enjoy life without having to tear into your food budget or mangle some other essential aspect of staying alive. being forced into a culture like this sucks.

but hey, if you read all this way maybe that means you were convinced and will join me on the FUCK Capitalism and Santa Claus AND The Easter Bunny For Good Measure train!!! i can finally live at peace knowing that im not insane for seemingly being the only one thinking like this ! the good thing is that even though gift giving practices are thoroughly ingrained in our culture, there isnt anything stopping yourself from changing. maybe talk to your friends and instead of doing your next gift exchange, you can just have a get together and have a potlatch or something. more importantly, stop waiting for that person's birthday/other event to contact them!! just send them a message and say you appreciate them. its not weird i promise, they will most likely feel warm and fuzzy inside for the day. anyways, i appreciate YOU for reading <3, hopefully motivation to write the next post comes a lot sooner!

:>