“You don’t celebrate your birthday? I think everyone should celebrate their day because you’ve survived another year of life, and made many accomplishments.”, said everybody ever. Birthdays, however, are just an overrated piece of time when you tick yet another meaningless event off of your calendar.
Sure, a century ago, when life expectancy was 38 years, celebrating your survival was psychologically necessary. Now, due to medicine and safety mechanisms, life expectancy is 85 and even the weakest survive by sticking surgical pipes through their bodies to keep them alive, year after year after year. Happy Birthday Vegetable.
“It’s one day a year which you can have all to yourself.” WRONG. With 7 billion people living in the world, I share the day with 19 million others. 13 of my Facebook friends have birthdays today. Plus, why only limit myself to celebrate one day? If you’re really about living, shouldn’t you be doing that to the fullest each and every day? I hate to agree with something Flo Rida rapped about, but he’s right when he says, “I don’t want no cake on my birthday, I want my cake everyday.” I also agree with him in regards to “apple bottom jeans and boots with the furs”.
To observe the correlation between Birthdays and meaningless banter, I conducted an experiment with Facebook birthdays. Facebook publicizes your birthday which generates countless posts from people coming out of the wood work just to “wish” you a generic “Happy Birthday”. In my tests, I hid/unhid my birthday from my profile for portions of time to see how many birthday posts I would get on October 2nd, 2012.
- 12am – 9:15am / Hidden – 1 post added. A friend that probably had my birthday in their calendar.
- 9:15am – 10:19am / Shown – 33 posts added.
- 10:19am – 11:17am / Hidden – 3 posts added. Friends that probably saw Happy Birthday posts in their news feed which was aggregated by others.
- 11:17am – 12:26pm / Shown – 41 posts added.
- 12:26pm – 1:31pm / Hidden – 3 posts added. Friends that probably saw Happy Birthday posts in their news feed which was aggregated by others.
- 1:31pm – 6:08pm / Shown – 85 posts added.
As you can see, every time my birthday was shown on my profile, the amount of these posts went up. I also noticed that the text messages I received on my phone saying “Happy Birthday” went up as well during those times. In total, I’ve had 166 posts written while my birthday was only visible for 6.5 hours on my profile.
Most of the people that posted didn’t know that I hadn’t celebrated a birthday since I was 18 and through good intentions said something, even if it was due to the cycle that Facebook/life has created for them. Then there were friends that knew my beliefs, but still posted, “I’m only telling you Happy Birthday because I know how much you hate it.” or “Happy Birthday Homie. I know you do not celebrate, but try it this year your will see its a good time!” I can’t wait to see these friends, because I’ll say, “I know you don’t like to get punched in the anus, but I’m going to do it anyway, and you’ll see it’s a good time.” Then I’ll hold up my fist covered with a latex glove and industrial grade silicone lube and start jabbing away like I was playing Mike Tyson’s punch out.
Now, if birthdays involved me sitting on the corner of the street and just getting hand jobs all day long, I’d be celebrating every year. You’d see eVites, Facebook events, group texts, Hallmark cards and a plane flying overhead with a large banner saying, “Come one, come all to 2nd ave. and 3rd st. to celebrate another year of my birth. Let’s rock out with my cock out.”
Unfortunately, that’s not how it is. I don’t plan on celebrating my birthday. I haven’t celebrated it since I was 18, and I don’t plan on celebrating ever. I value myself more than just following others through this cycle and I hope that others choose to value themselves as well. Mostly, though, years of conditioning will drown out the facts and logic of this article and it’ll just fall on deaf ears.
If they only knew how much sweeter the cake is every other day.
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