Oh seriously, if someone buys you a gift you don't want, appreciate the gesture and throw it away if it's "meaningless chaff". Or if you like it, adopt it. Like I adopted the llama cufflinks I got from my girlfriend for no discernable reason. But for God's sake stop bitching about how people buying you shit you don't need is the horrible burden of capitalism. Go live in a van with 6 pairs of underwear like I did for 10 years and you may lay a tiny claim to not wanting "stuff" because it weighs you down a little. But first see if you can discern from the heights of your high horse whether most gifts aren't given in earnest.

Only a spoiled child gets angry about getting gifts they didn't want.

>> Honestly, what are you trying to do here? Whatever it is, stop.

"Do"? "stop"? Under whose authority and why? I was making a comment. If you think I'm trying to demolish some moral position you hold, go ahead and explain why... but "honestly"+"whatever"+"stop" doesn't tell me what you're actually objecting to.

You're projecting a lot of other people's nonsense onto me. Throwing away a gift that you do, in fact, know someone gave you in earnest still feels like shit. So you wind up in a no-win situation. At least if you're a nice person.

And then you come in telling me I'm an asshole for having independent taste, and telling me I should just mold my personality to whatever nonsense other people decide to give me, and really I don't have my own taste after all and it's normal to submerge myself in the crap other people saddle me with. You come in telling me, and everyone else in this thread with the same position, that you know better than we do about our personality on the basis of exactly zero personal acquaintance. Just because you're cool with your llama cufflinks doesn't mean everyone else needs to be cool with the arbitrary bullshit that gets flung at us. Fuck off with that shit.

It's just wild to me that someone could care so much about it, or get so worked up. I'm not telling you to let other people mold your personality. I'm just saying it often happens and it's not really an earth-shattering tragedy if it does. You can also do what most people do which is put stuff you don't want to throw away in a box in the closet and forget about it.

Any papercut, iterated enough times with no good way to respond, eventually becomes a source of anger. I bet there are other things about people that will make more sense to you with that in mind.

Life is full of repeated, daily annoyances. Allowing yourself to get angry about them is a choice. Traffic is super irritating. But if you get angrier and angrier every day you have to fight traffic until you explode, that's an anger management problem. Taking a breath and letting the small shit go, accepting that other people do dumb things sometimes, you don't have to succumb to anger. Anger is where you stop being smart. Papercuts are just papercuts. You wouldn't scream at the first or the hundredth. They won't kill you. They heal and you get more. That's life.