Dec 27, 2025
I've noticed that there's an increasing trend towards using wishlists as a way to coordinate what gifts to get a person. Not only does Amazon have built-in support for wishlists, but there's also lots of other tools out there for coordinating wishlists among groups of gift-givers. It sounds like a good idea: "If I make a wishlist, then people don't have to guess what I'd like. I get what I want, and other people don't have to put so much effort into coming up with something to get me. I'm really just doing them a favor."
While there's certainly some benefits to using wishlists, there's also some drawbacks. In my opinion, the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. I'll attempt to explain some of the largest drawbacks I've noticed and was able to put my finger on, but I'm sure there's more reasons.
You would think that getting what you want will increase your satisfaction, but that might not necessarily be the case. In my experience, it seems like the act of making a wishlist draws my attention away from the people giving me the gifts and redirects it towards the contents of the gifts themselves. I find that this shift in attention makes me less satisfied with my gifts.
I think the main reason that creating a wishlist decreases my satisfaction with gifts is that it essentially reinforces a mindset that is focused on getting what I want: a selfish mindset. Since selfishness makes a person less grateful, and being less grateful makes a person more unhappy, it's no wonder that making a wishlist makes it harder for me to be happy. This is especially detrimental during Christmas, when your focus should really be on what you're getting for others, rather than on what you are going to be receiving.
I think the secret sauce for being the happiest with what you are given is not to control what you are given, but instead to avoid developing any expectations about what you might be given. Expectations are the thief of joy, and wishlist making is a major source of expectations.
Until wishlists were invented, it was genuinely difficult to give someone a good gift. You had to do some research, ask around, and think hard about it. Wishlists remove the difficulty of gift-giving. This seems to transform gift-giving from an act of love into a mechanical transaction. If I know that something was bought off my wishlist, I've found that I end up experiencing a weird mixure of feelings: excitement for getting something I've been really wanting for a while, as well as a sad realization that the person put very little thought into the gift.
Here's my perspective as a gift giver: the times where I bought a gift off of someone's wishlist, it usually felt boring, obligatory, and unsatisfying. Constrast that with times I really put in some effort to find a gift that I thought the receiver would appreciate: I search and search for something special that would be just right for them, and my search suddenly comes to an end as I find the perfect thing and begin looking forward with anticipation towards the day I give it to them and see their face light up. Although it's harder to get something for someone that hasn't made a wishlist, it's a lot more rewarding.
Put simply, since we say all the time that "it's the thought that counts," it shouldn't surprise us that by removing the need to put thought into the gift-giving process, wishlists also remove a lot of the love, meaning, and connection that would otherwise be a result of the gift.
When people only buy things off your wishlist, the gifts you get are limited to your imagination and experience, but when people buy you things they came up with themselves, you get a much greater variety of things, many of which can challenge what you thought you liked. I've realized that the gifts that I most liked receiving were things I wouldn't have thought of getting for myself.