Buying birthday gifts are pointless. The idea of them is completely vain and shallow. It feeds into society’s obsession with materialistic values. Giving someone a gift for their birthday is taking away the acknowledgement from the one person who truly deserves it, one’s mother. The gift of life should more than suffice for any one person.
Birthday gifts have no real purpose. Why are you thanking someone for being conceived? And furthermore, the person you are thanking for being in this world usually asks for a gift receipt just in case they would like to return it for something better. This is nonsense! How does giving someone a birthday gift that they will most likely return enrich anyone’s life at all?
Giving someone a thoughtful present is always a generous idea, but one comes to expect these things on the anniversary of their birth now. People expect to receive material possessions and money because they were born. To me, that seems like we are teaching people that they deserve something for nothing.
It also seems to teach people that the more a person spends on you the more they love you. It is telling children in divorce cases to love their father more because they bought them a power wheels while their mother is working two jobs to send them to school.
People make fun of homemade gifts, baked goods, etc. , but those gifts are much more valuable than any Gucci bag, because they take time, effort and thought. That shows a person you are willing to go out of your way to do something for them, rather than picking them up some shiny trinket while at the mall doing errands. Buying gifts takes away from people’s creativity and focuses on people’s wallet size.
If anyone deserves a birthday gift at all, that person would be the person’s mother. A mother carries you inside of her own body for the better part of a year, and then proceeds to pass you through her loins. It is an incomparably painful, bloody, fairly disgusting, and exceptionally long process after which a mother holds the person whose birthday it is in her arms and showers them with love selflessly. What exactly did this birthday person do to deserve anything on this particular day that merits any kind of reward annually?
We as a society should agree to start getting our mothers presents on our birthdays to thank them for bearing us the gift of life. We should bake them a cake, sing to them, and rub their feet before they fall asleep that night, because every birthday you have should be a reminder of what someone went through for you to be in this world. That is a true gift beyond comparison.
In closing, purchasing someone a gift on their birthday is not a sensible idea in any case. Birthday gifts cause people to be greedy and selfish. They diminish the value of thoughtfulness and creativity. People stress and spend a lot to buy these birthday gifts for all the wrong reasons. Every single person in this world has already gotten the best gift anyone could ever ask for, the gift of life, and that should be enough.