My friend has a birthday coming up and her friend, who I barely know, started a huge text thread to coordinate a group gift. She wanted everyone to supply personal anecdata: a favorite memory, a “silly photo” of the protagonist, other particular template items.

This is a very annoying idea for a gift IMO! It is confusing two well-established categories of gift that serve mutually exclusive purposes:

1. Group gifts, where everyone pools their money in order to buy one big gift
2. Personal gifts, where you choose/make a gift that is highly individualized and expresses your unique relationship with that person

Group gifts are organized by one “representative” friend and fanned out to lesser friends and acquaintances. They are especially useful in awkward coworker scenarios where you want to get someone something but have no idea what would be good; the group gift defers that decision to someone who actually knows the recipient’s taste with the added benefit of allowing people to chip in the amount of money that is appropriate to their level of friendship.

Personal gifts are for when you are the best (or a close) friend. The thing that makes them personal and good isn’t just the DIY aspect—it’s the intimacy of it, the way you work in shared experiences and memories that wouldn’t make sense to someone outside the relationship.

The “group personal” gift is neither of these things. It asks you to be personal, but you might not be ready for that. It asks you to be intimate, but then requires you to share the intimacy with 25 other friends you don’t know. It asks you to be creative, but then imposes a template that may make no sense for the relationship at hand. Not everyone takes silly photos! Some friends live far away!

This is a cynical take, but it’s my dumpster site and I get to leave in throwaway content: I think the real motive for these group personal gifts is a dominance play. It’s laying claim to a best friend slot and then demanding that others subordinate their expression of intimacy to the template permitted by that specific friendship. And then making them feel inadequate as friends if they don’t have a specific silly photo.

Well, either it’s a dominance play or just extroverts being super fucking weird.

Anyway, please don’t do this shit! If you want to congratulate your bestie on their birthday and want to put a lot of effort into it then just do that—may I suggest a PowerPoint?—but don’t cramp anyone else’s style.

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Post-coffee addition: I think another reason people reach for these kind of structured gifts is as a nostalgia play. When we were kids, friendship was about unconditional loyalty and concentric circles of intimacy. The best friend, whose friendship with the birthday haver often traces back to high school or earlier, understands the relationship on these terms and wants the gift to reflect and energize that conception of the friendship.

Adult relationships, by contrast, are more compartmented and situational: You may share everything about work and family but avoid discussing sex, for example. Non-group personal gifts allow you to express intimacy that is neither all-encompassing nor subject to a hierarchy of closeness. That very fact is a challenge to the bestie’s identity. The bestie recognizes that the protagonist’s life has expanded and misses being #1. Organizing the photo album is a way to relive that inaccessible past.

It’s not wrong for the bestie to pine for the past. I also feel a sense of grief over the kinds of innocent, unyielding friendships I had in elementary and middle school. Being an adult and having to impose and respect boundaries is kinda exhausting sometimes. The question is what you do about that grief. Do you recognize the maturity it represents? Or are you stuck with the sense of loss?