[FREE] Don't Get Sucked Into The Thoughtful Gesture Industrial Complex

From boo baskets to event planners for proposals, we have to put an end to astroturfed relationship expectations.

Note: I originally published this as a paid article around Halloween last year, so excuse all the mentions of Halloween. Now it’s free for everyone to enjoy! Please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber if you like what you see.

Given that we just had Halloween, I discovered the concept of a “boo basket.” At first I assumed this was some kind of Halloween basket of candy and gifts for children, given to them by their parents. This seemed unnecessary, since we all know they will get plenty of candy (most of which will be thrown away or secretly eaten by parents anyway) on the actual night of Halloween.

But it was even worse than I thought—the boo basket trend originated on TikTok, and while some of it is about parents gifting their children, a great deal of it is directed toward adults gifting each other. Specifically, a new thing men should do for women, lest they be “doing the bare minimum.” (I will go a step further: if your boyfriend watches enough TikTok to know what a boo basket is, he’s gigacooked.)

I love giving gifts, and I love to shop! I go way overboard every single Christmas. I sew clothes for my husband and kids, and buying the fabric is half the fun. And, duh, I love to shop for myself. You know a Sezane raffia bag on TheRealReal hates to see me coming. So I am not a big anti-consumerist, anti-holiday, anti-fun killjoy. That said, boo baskets feel like a bit too much, especially for adults.

It’s obviously fine if couples want to get each other Halloween presents, as silly as that maybe sound. I’m pretty sure I got my husband sour straws for Halloween long before we had kids. I think what bothers me is that it’s a social media trend, and therefore a manufactured expectation that didn’t exist two years ago, along with many other similar (and equally ridiculous) astroturfed expectations.

The way TikTok works is that a boo basket isn’t just something that one especially gifty person does for their partner, but for some people, an expectation or source of conflict. According to TikTok (spurious “according to,” I know) some women expect their boyfriends to provide boo baskets, and then some women feel unwanted and undesired when their boyfriends fail to do so. It’s one thing to compare your boyfriend or husband to the partners of your friends, and another thing to compare them to the partners of TikTok influencers, who might be orchestrating everything themselves anyway. And of course, this also means parents are stuck wondering if other kids at their children’s school will get boo baskets, then frantically trying to keep up so their kids don’t feel less loved in comparison.

As silly as I feel writing the word “boo basket” in an otherwise serious tone, I feel like boo baskets are a great example of how TikTok has created what I’ll just be calling the Thoughtful Gesture Industrial Complex—new completely manufactured expectations with no cultural history or significance, driven mostly by influencers attempting to one-up each other with more and more elaborate things to convince people they need to do and buy. It’s the “hip dips” of gifts, if you will—something most people never would have considered, let alone worried about, if TikTok and Instagram hadn’t gotten involved. And boo baskets aren’t the only example.

Obviously, some gift traditions are good. I do have a bit of a traditionalist streak in me, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect an engagement ring, a nice wedding, or a gift for Mother’s Day, nor do I think it’s unreasonable to expect your husband to do something nice for you after you give birth to his child (I was so blinded by my insatiable hunger and gestational diabetes that I asked my husband for “pop tarts” as my push present, which I’m aware is the most pick-me NLOG move of all.)

But I guess I draw the line if the expectation for buying and gifting something happened in the past ten years, and was manufactured entirely on social media.

Take, for example, kids’ birthday parties. I actually wrote about why I like the tradition of giving kids gifts for their birthdays and why no-gift parties are kind of a buzzkill (this was arguably my most controversial article ever.) I think kids’ birthday parties should ideally include some kind of decoration, a cake, and presents. But if you’re very active on Instagram or other forms of social media, you will be led to believe that you should be required to spend thousands of dollars on your child’s birthday parties and that you need to be giving out bespoke gift bags that, dare I say, are boo-basket-coded. For example, assuming enough families even trust you to host a molestation-free sleepover, you might feel like you are expected to buy aesthetic glamping tents for the event, complete with personalized snack trays and Yeti cups:

As silly as this sounds, just imagine if your daughter keeps getting invited to parties like this, and then it’s time for her party, and you have to be the lame parent who says it’s too much—even if you can afford it—just because you think it’s stupid. Because it is stupid, but your kid may not think so! When I was fourteen, I thought my entire future depended on a Juicy Couture T-shirt with a clearly visible logo. Kids are insane, and sometimes it’s the parent’s job to tell them they’re being insane, and this job becomes a lot harder when you have to, more or less, say “I’m the reasonable one, it’s all your friends’ parents who are wrong.” But when I was a kid, we had sleepovers the old-fashioned way—immediately singling out the bitch of the group and trying to make her pee in her sleeping bag by dipping her hand in water.

It’s one thing to say these astroturfed consumption trends are too much (and I think almost 99% of people would agree with me there) and it’s another thing to be the one parent in your circle opting out, even though the rest of them are only doing it to avoid being the one parent who isn’t doing it. That’s why these things are so hard to do away with. Even if only a minority of people think they’re worthwhile, the social pressure can force a bunch of reasonable people to play along.

It’s happening with promposals too. Now, in order to avoid doing the “bare minimum,” teenage boys need to conduct elaborate surprise “proposals” when asking their girlfriends to the prom. Up until very recently, asking a girl to the prom was as simple as, well, asking her, sometimes in between geometry and world history class. It only gets worse as the proposals become realer. Marriage proposals now have hired planners, the way you might hire a planner for your actual wedding, with “packages” costing upwards of $1,000.

I don’t think most people are doing these things. Most people can’t afford them, anyway. But for those who can afford it, especially if they have a partner or children who are steeped in social media and might be basing their expectations off what they see, they have to make a decision: do you opt into the ridiculous trend to keep your partner/child/family member happy, or do you buck the trend and risk making them feel unappreciated? It’s easy to say you’d never want to marry someone who would expect something like this, but what if your previously-reasonable girlfriend has just seen way too much TikTok and slowly come to believe that any man who doesn’t hire a proposal coordinator doesn’t really love her? Is it worth risking a rift in your years-long relationship over a large sum of money (that you have, but would rather not spend on something stupid?) You only get engaged once, right, so why not do as much as you can do, even if it’s silly? It’s easy to see how a “reasonable” person can fall victim to this.

One of the main culprits here is that celebrities used to be a separate group of people and we all understood it wasn’t our responsibility to live like them. We saw Celebrity Cribs in 2002 and understood that Ricky Martin and Sarah Michelle Gellar lived insanely luxurious lives, complete with rotating water beds where the “magic happened.” But social media changed the game. Even celebrities we all knew to be billionaires (or at least multi-multi-millionaires) are showing us their most intimate moments on a regular basis, and regular people can be tricked into thinking we needed to imitate them, even in a very subtle way. I recall a friend of mine—a very successful tech worker who is squarely in the upper middle class—lamenting that she felt guilty she wasn’t able to give her child the birthday party they deserved. When I asked what she was talking about, she (and I’m not kidding) sent me this:

For those of you who don’t know, that Kylie Jenner’s daughter’s birthday party, and easily the most unsettling bounce house I’ve ever seen in my life. And my friend is smart—she was in her thirties, not some impressionable teenager, and she knew Kylie Jenner was not a relatable everywoman. But we are more easily influenced than we think, and she had seen enough content about lavish birthday parties that she felt her child’s totally normal birthday party was inadequate.

I even fell for this myself. Although I don’t spend much time on Instagram, I briefly scrolled and saw a mom showcasing her elaborate decor she did for her two-year-old’s birthday week. She had themed balloons, decor, and special plates for the entire week. I knew her child was likely too young to really care (as was mine) but a big part of me felt like I would be missing out on the special moment if I failed to do this for my child. She would only turn two once, and why would I not do as much as I could do? I considered buying some decorations which I would dutifully arrange for a full week, only for my husband to tell me this was “stupid” and forbid it. (By the way, easy defense strategy against this expectation: a husband who will loudly read out all your Amazon purchases of the month, much to your humiliation.)

It’s easy to make fun of moms for being materialistic and keeping up with the Joneses, and maybe some of these women really are just addicted to shopping and consuming, but I think a lot of other women (and perhaps men) just want to celebrate things to the fullest, and are learning about new benchmarks for celebration that they suddenly feel guilty for not meeting. They might worry their partners or children will be disappointed, or simply feel that they only have one opportunity to do a promposal, an engagement, a fifth birthday party, what have you—and want to make the most of it. And our concept of “the most” has changed considerably.

These trends also shed light on an unexpected class divide within the upper middle class. It’s no surprise that almost every family I’ve seen doing this stuff is suburban. Affluent urban families have just as much money (and sometimes more) but because living in an urban center requires some degree of minimalism, excessive gift-buying or decor-assembling is just out of the question. For many city-dwelling families, even rich ones, hosting a birthday party in their own home is unfathomable due to the amount of space required, and they will sooner spend thousands of dollars renting out a trampoline park instead of buying bespoke sleepover tents and balloon arches. Perhaps this is another ridiculous expectation, albeit not one driven by TikTok. Side note: I did once attend an extremely bougie children’s birthday party thrown by a Manhattan couple, complete with two food trucks, catering, and a swim instructor. However, they had the space to do it—they just went to their second house upstate.

But—and I know this might contradict my entire article here—I still can’t tell how common this stuff actually is. It’s not common in my direct social circle, because those people are more of the urbanite minimalist stripe. I’m still trying to figure out how much of this is just completely manufactured by social media. Are the women who are angry at their boyfriends for not getting them boo baskets…part of it? Like, is that even a real sentiment, or are they being paid to post that to promote the concept of a boo basket? Which shady Amazon trinket seller could be behind all this? I truly don’t know. I have to assume that at least some of these people are real. But even then, I’m not sure it matters. Things start out as ridiculous social media trends and slowly infect real life. At one point, elaborate gender reveal parties were a goofy Instagram thing—now, most of us know someone who has done this.

Obviously, we have to collectively say no to this stuff because it’s just become too much. But it’s very hard to say “no” when you get the sense that even the people who agree with you are going along with the trend anyway—it’s the gift version of the parental safetyism arms race. Nobody wants to be the one man who doesn’t stage an elaborate proposal with its own project manager and hired photographer if that’s what all his friends are doing. Nobody wants to be the one mom who hosts a sleepover with a bowl of popcorn, a movie, and a pull-out couch, if all the other kids are getting custom tents with fairy lights. And nobody wants to be the poor sucker who believes they don’t have to supply their twenty-eight-year-old girlfriend with a bespoke boo basket on Halloween.

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