There's a well-documented effect in psychology called hedonic adaptation — the tendency for any new thing, however exciting at first, to quickly become the new normal. A new phone feels remarkable for about a week. A new car, maybe a month. Then it's just the phone, just the car — invisible, the way most possessions eventually become.
Experiences resist this in a way objects don't. A holiday from five years ago can still make you smile on a bad Tuesday. A concert, a trip, a strange night that became a good story — these don't fade the way things do. They become part of how you think about yourself.
So where does that leave gift-giving?
Most of us still default to objects, because they're easy to wrap and easy to choose from a list. But the gifts people actually bring up years later tend to be the ones that created a memory, told them something true about themselves, or gave them a story worth repeating.
A strange middle ground
A star dedication sits in an odd spot between the two categories. It's technically an object — a certificate, a map, a name attached to a real point in the sky. But what it produces is an experience: the moment someone reads the message, the night they go outside to find it, the story they tell afterward. At Galaxiana, that starts at $34.99 — about the cost of a meal out that, six months later, neither of you will remember ordering.
The next time you're choosing between something to unwrap and something to remember, it's worth asking which one you'd rather be handed yourself.