We keep working to provide more and more, cheaper and cheaper, better and better products to consumers.

Nobody in our era has more attention lavished upon him than the consumer.

Why? Because satisfying customers is what brings us success, and success brings us great rewards — bigger homes, cooler cars, higher-fi home theaters — all eventually culminating in a comfortable retirement.

We work hard and make sacrifices to improve the lives of consumers so we can have better lives as consumers.

So, we, ourselves, are split between roles of slave and master: as producers we sacrifice everything; as consumers we bask in autocratic pleasure  — we expect everything, and we are always right.

But does this way of living make sense? Is it possible that we are sacrificing the better half of life?

To repeat a cliche: does consumption bring any lasting happiness at all? What if the cornerstone of lasting happiness is not having, but doing? Are we selling our only hope of fullness (of doing) for empty promises of happiness in having?

Or worse, do we actually think these sacrifices to who-knows-what make us “good people”?

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This is not a merely theoretical question: If we see consumption as the point of production, we will naturally live a very different work ethic than someone who sees production as the point of production.

And even among those who see production as intrinsically valuable, the attitude one takes toward the consumer’s role in production will also determine one’s work ethic.

It is here — in the attitude toward the other — that people get tangled up in their thinking. Things seem to come down to terms of selfishness vs selflessness. It seems that ethically one’s self is mainly something to either indulge or overcome. The give-and-take of coming to agreements is finding the selfish-selfless balance so nobody takes more than their share of the goodness. We compromise by averaging our interests. Or we claim the higher good for our self by sacrificing our own lower interests in order to be altruistic. But what is gained, really?

I find this way of looking at things depressing. I think the example of really great gifts shows an alternative.

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When we give an inspired gift — the kind that brings enormous pleasure to giver and receiver — the gift-giver and the gift-receiver participate together in a gift-exchange relationship. Both parties must participate in the right spirit or the gift is spoiled.

The giver must care about the receiver and act, not selflessly, but otherfully and togetherfully. The giver is attuned to the receiver’s being (in the form of the kinds of things the receiver loves in the world) but also to the relationship that binds the giver and receiver together. When the gift is loved for its especial, specific perfection — perfect in a way that shows that the giver really knows and acknowledges the receiver — the relationship is consummated in the gift.

As always, the cliche is true: It is the thought that counts. But the thought in question is not the mere intention to please (though that is very important). The best gift shows that the giver values and has thought about the receiver, about the relationship they share, about what can express that relationship in concrete form, consummate it, make it more concrete, more social, more visible to the world.

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Let’s compare the otherful-togetherful gift with the selfish gift and the selfless gift.

A selfish gift is one that gives the receiver a sense that they as an individual did not really factor much into the gift. The selfish giver might give something he himself wants and indulged his own desire to buy it, using the occasion of the gift as an excuse. Or he might buy something he thinks the other should want to have, disregarding the question of whether the receiver actually does want it. Or he might buy the gift as a form of self-expression, showing his wealth or great taste or ingenuity, etc., but not thinking at all about the intrinsic value of the gift to the receiver.

The common quality is that the giver does not consider the experience of the receiver, only his own experience. The giver does not share the receiver’s pleasure (though he might take pleasure in his own success). The receiver is not fully present to the giver in the act of giving.

A selfless gift is one that is intended to give the receiver pleasure, but in a distant, non-involved way. The receiver is viewed as an individual independent of relationship, and so the gift does not affirm the relationship between the giver and receiver. The gift is simply the transfer of desired property from one party to another. The selfless giver will sometimes ask what the other wants and give him exactly what he wants. Or the selfless giver will buy his way out of the obligation to give a gift by simply transferring money to the receiver. Or the selfless giver will give the appropriate gift for the occasion.

The common quality is that the giver does not consider his own experience giving , only that of the receiver. As with the selfish gift, the giver does not share the receiver’s pleasure, but in this case, it is because he does not take pleasure in the giving. The giver is not fully present to the himself in the act of giving.

With the selfish gift, the gift could have been given to anyone.

With the selfless gift, the gift could have been given by anyone.

An otherful-togetherful gift could only have been given by this gift-giver to this gift-receiver.

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Few gifts are purely selfish or selfless or otherful-togetherful, but the point here is not to create classifications. It is to point to an ideal.

The ideal of otherful-togetherful is completely outside the discourse of individualism vs collectivism, of selfishness vs altruism, and of company-centricity vs customer-centricity (or user-centricity).

The otherful-togetherful gift transcends both self-centricity and altruism and points to a paradigm of relationship-centricity.

This paradigm is the form of successful friendships, marriages, businesses, and communities. It is lack of awareness of this paradigm that has allowed so many precious cultural assets to decay into burdensome, pleasureless irrelevance.

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When businesses learn to stop thinking their choice is either 1) selfishly foisting products they think are great on customers they barely know, or 2) selflessly losing themselves in conforming to the customer’s wishes (which takes the form of coercing employees to sacrifice their own health and happiness in the quest to satisfy the customer), and learn instead to be relationship-centric it will be far more possible for people to create, give and receive happiness in producing and consuming.

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There’s also a selfish and selfless mode of receiving gifts, and that is also relevant to how business is done.

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I’m beginning to see brand as the symbolic tokens of a gift-giving relationship.