How convenience culture is reshaping the meaning of giving.
Photo Credit: Jennifer Mesa
By: Wesley Liu
Every year, according to tradition, my extended family would gather at Christmas, and the kids would sit around the tree, waiting their turn to unwrap gifts. The ritual involved suspense, excitement, and the kind of forced patience that only children can find unbearable. Wrapping paper piled up. Adults laughed from the kitchen. For a brief moment each year, time slowed.
But in the past few years, something changed.
What I first notice around the Christmas tree does not end with Christmas. As the decorations come down and winter lingers, I see the same pattern resurface just weeks later on Valentine’s Day. The shift from wrapped gifts to gift cards, from surprise to specification, is not confined to family gatherings; it quietly seeps into romantic relationships as well.
Among my friends, Valentine’s Day increasingly resembles a coordinated exchange rather than a thoughtful offering. Partners send links to the exact items they want. Dinner plans are pre-negotiated days in advance. Gifts often take digital form, like a same-day Amazon package ordered with minimal deliberation or a gift card chosen for convenience. What was once a small but meaningful ritual, one that involved choosing flowers, handwriting a note, and hoping a gift communicates affection, gradually gives way to efficiency. The suspense that once defined sitting around the Christmas tree feels absent on February 14th too. In both cases, what disappears is not generosity, but the embodied, interpretive act that makes the gesture meaningful in the first place.
Physical gift-giving is valuable, and its decline serves as a lens for a broader critique of digital media, efficiency-obsessed thinking, and contemporary culture amongst the youth.
First, requesting specific gifts diminishes the meaning of gift-giving itself.
At its core, gift-giving is not about utility; it is about recognition. To give someone a gift is to ask: What would make them feel seen? That question requires attention, memory, and interpretation. It forces the giver to engage with the inner life of the recipient, even imperfectly.
When we request specific gifts, that interpretive labor disappears. The gift becomes an item to be delivered rather than a gesture. While this may guarantee satisfaction, it strips gift-giving of its relational risk. There is no longer the possibility of surprise, kindness, or excitement, just the completion of a personally tailored wishlist.
This shift reflects a deeper cultural shift toward strict optimization. We want the best outcome with the least friction. We curate our Spotify playlists, tailor our algorithms, and fine-tune our Amazon wish lists. Inefficiency is treated as a flaw rather than a feature. But traditions survive precisely because they are inefficient. They slow us down. They ask us to wait, to watch, to participate in something larger than ourselves. When gift-giving becomes transactional, it ceases to bind people together. It becomes individualized consumption disguised as generosity.
Second, the disappearance of physical gifts signals a retreat from embodied social life.
Physical gifts occupy space. They have weight, memory, and permanence. They linger on desks, shelves, and nightstands long after the holidays end. A book with a folded corner, a sweater slightly too big, or a mug that chips over time carries with it the memory of the giver.
Digital or monetary gifts do not do this. They dissolve into the same screens that already dominate our attention. A gift card is spent and forgotten. A subscription renews automatically. There is no object to stumble upon months later and think, someone once chose this for me.
This matters because memory is spatial and embodied. Our relationships are shaped not only by communication, but by shared physical presence: by objects, places, and rituals that anchor us to one another. When everything meaningful is mediated through a screen, our social lives become strangely weightless.
The decline of physical gift-giving is not an isolated phenomenon. It parallels the decline of shared meals, long conversations, and unstructured time together. We are more connected than ever, yet less rooted in any particular moment.
Third, the loss of gift-giving rituals mirrors the broader erosion of communal patience.
Sitting around a Christmas tree is an exercise in delayed gratification. Children must wait while others open their gifts. Attention is shared. The experience unfolds collectively rather than on-demand.
Digital culture teaches the opposite. Content is instant, personalized, and endlessly scrollable. We no longer wait for moments to happen, we summon them. Over time, this conditions us to find collective rituals frustrating or unnecessary.
It is no coincidence that the same generation abandoning physical gifts also struggles with boredom, silence, and unstructured social time. These are not character flaws; they are learned responses to an environment optimized for stimulation.
These troubling habits should come as no surprise. How often do we anxiously check our phones while waiting in line, riding an elevator, or walking to class? How often is our first instinct in the morning to reach for a screen? I am personally responsible for many of these habits, and I suspect my twelve-year-old cousin scrolling Instagram or TikTok is not all that different.
So where do we go from here?
First, college students and recent graduates must model healthier relationships with technology. This does not require rejecting digital tools outright. It requires resisting their totalizing influence and its invasion into our interpersonal relationships. If we do not actively practice presence, we will lose the capacity for it. Social skills, like muscles, weaken when they are not exercised.
Being present means allowing moments to unfold without constant documentation or distraction. It means tolerating silence, boredom, and awkwardness–the very conditions under which real connection forms.
Second, we must intentionally revive older, slower forms of togetherness. The next time you want to play a digital game, invite friends over for a physical board game instead. The next time you scroll through Instagram stories, ask those friends to meet for coffee and share personal stories in person. The next time you attend a family gathering, resist the convenience of gift cards. Wrap something that reminds you of them. Place it under the tree. Accept that it may not be perfect.
These choices may feel inefficient, even outdated. But they reintroduce friction into our lives, and friction is what makes relationships real. In the end, this argument is not really about gifts. It is about what we lose when convenience replaces care, when efficiency replaces ritual, and when screens replace shared space.
Valentine’s Day does not feel different because love has disappeared. It feels different because the rituals that once embodied it have grown thinner. Romance has not ended; it has simply been streamlined. If we want February 14th to mean more than a scheduled dinner and a pre-selected package, we must choose presence over convenience. We must be willing to risk choosing the wrong flowers, writing an imperfect note, or planning something that cannot be optimized by an algorithm. If we want our holidays—whether in December or in February—to retain their weight, we must deliberately gather around one another again, not around our screens. That choice begins not with grand gestures, but with one thoughtful gift, one shared moment, and the willingness to slow down long enough for meaning to return.
Wesley Liu is a sophomore studying Philosophy with a minor in Political Science from San Francisco, CA. He is also the opinion editor at the Penn Post. His email is wesl@sas.upenn.edu.
