As much as the development and opening up of the World Wide Web is meant to make our lives easier, it can often make for a source of information overload. This complicates things which were meant to be simplified by the very thing that adds all the complexity and this leads to many of us spending way too much time online unproductively.

One such area of our lives in which information overload seems to be having a detrimental effect is that of how it affects the art of gift-sourcing and giving. It was meant to be made easier by the web, wasn’t it and yet it’s just so much more complicated?

I mean there’s so much to have to think about now which was previously not a problem at all, such as how you’d perhaps be walking right into a cliché trap if you went online and Googled something like “gift ideas for xyz!” What you’d ideally get are results which are probably not even all that pure in their intentions, optimised for the search engines so that the creator of the subsequent content published can make themselves a bit of money.

It’s not always like this, but in most cases the highest ranking results would be rather hastily put-together lists of gift ideas you should rather avoid, given the fact that they become clichéd by mere virtue of having been featured so prominently in the search engine results. Yes, something like a personalised mug might have made for a somewhat original gift idea for a colleague’s birthday for example, but because this idea is featured so commonly on those “best birthday gift ideas” lists you find online, pretty much all the originality is taken out of it.

It’s not original if EVERYBODY is doing it…

So then, what does it take to master the art of gift sourcing in an age where everything seems to have been done to death and in an age where everything you do seems to be some kind of performance you have to give, for which you’re going to be rated? I won’t get into too much detail about that though as it’s perhaps a discussion for another topic altogether, but think about it – you get rated for the “type of guest” you are if you take up an AirBnB, use Uber, wear a certain outfit to a certain function, etc…

Anyway, mastering the art of gift giving in the internet age – the age where there’s seemingly not much room left for creativity – you perhaps need to take things back to the original thinking behind what gift sourcing and giving is all about.

You can get just about anything shipped in from anywhere in the world today at next to nothing, so it’s not enough to be able to point to the origin of a particular gift. Rather, what you need to do is focus on gifts like sympathy gift baskets for example, since these have an underlying value which simply seeks to make the lives of the recipients easier.

Someone who is mourning the death of a loved-one for example would have a lot of guests coming over to pay their respects, in which case one of those sympathy gift baskets which cover the snacking needs of all who attend will do.