If you have ever stood in a store paralyzed over whether the candle is enough, whether the wine communicates something terrible about how little you care, whether showing up without something is worse than showing up with the wrong thing: there is a name for that. Tommy found it. Dr. Melissa Colt calls it trauma-based giving, which is the clinical way of saying you are not choosing a gift so much as you are paying a ransom.

Pete’s dentist, when Pete was a kid, gave him more metal fillings than any child with freshly grown adult teeth could possibly need. Every visit, something new to fill. It was, as Pete now recognizes, a textbook case of dental overtreatment. He responded the way anyone would: he avoided dentists entirely for the next seventeen years.