Also, giving any of these gifts to make someone feel bad about themselves makes you an enormous asshole. Use your words, be honest with people, and don’t go out of your way to humiliate or irritate people you don’t like. Life’s too short to spend it scheming.

If you’d met the kind of people who do this - they just don’t know anything in life they could honestly do otherwise. Sometimes they pretend to do something so well, that a fraction of the effort could be spent actually doing that instead of pretense.

But they sincerely think their ability to scheme is unchangeably better than their ability to actually do interesting things. Or maybe they take pride in that.

The point is - they treat wonderful things like something out of reach, while it clearly isn’t.