I stumbled upon this paper discussing a unique aspect of gift-giving. Mainly, it talks about how gifts that givers love to give are not always the gifts that recipients love to receive.

It's an interesting paper, because there definitely is something to being a good gift-giver. For example, every Christmas, my parents get my wife something that she really wanted, never would have bought for herself, that is almost always a complete surprise. One year, while my wife was going through some health struggles, my dad bought her a robot vacuum cleaner for Christmas. She told me later how perfect of a gift it was because she didn't know that she needed it until she had it.

Thus, I thought, and the typical advice seems to be, that a good gift giver is someone who gets the recipient something they want, that they don't need, that they likely wouldn't buy themselves at that time. But this paper explains that's not necessarily true.

It lists a lot of misconceptions people have about giving gifts.

For instance, the paper explains that while highly desirable gifts that are fun for the excitement or prestige upon opening them are fun for the giver, the recipients prefer something that will be more useful in the long-run.

There are a bunch of other examples, but I wanted to highlight one I've experienced multiple times.

There is a common idea that giving money or gift cards is not a "thoughtful" gift. For a giver, that may be the case. But often, recipients value those gifts more. It goes like this: Imagine you, the recipient, want a nice set of steak knives. These knives are expensive, and most people would probably balk at spending that much money on silverware. But, you love to barbecue. And there is nothing better, for you, than sitting down with a delicious ribeye and a nice steak knife.

Say a holiday is close—your birthday, Christmas, whatever—and you mention that you want this nice set of knives but can't quite afford it yet. Someone might hear that and think, "Ah! They want knives. I can get them some knives." But because they don't want to spend that much money on a gift—and rightly so—they get you different, less expensive, less quality knives. They are over the moon because they think they found a thoughtful gift. But you aren't too happy, because you didn't want those knives. You were more than happy to save money and buy the really nice knives eventually, and really would have appreciated maybe some money to build that pot of cash.

Do you see how cash—or a visa gift card—would actually be really thoughtful?

I think gift-giving is a unique skill, and something I'd like to be better at. The gist of the article is, essentially, when giving a gift, don't focus on how it makes you feel to give the gift, but imagine what the recipient will feel receiving the gift.

I think that's what people mean when they say they received a "thoughtful" gift. Sometimes, it's not about the actual item that was given, but the fact that the giver was able to discern that that specific item would make the recipient feel seen and loved. To do that, the focus has to be on what the recipient wants, and not what the giver wants to give.