I’m Done With Birthdays
Not ageing. Not candles or cake. Not even the marking of time. Birthdays themselves. Or rather, birthday celebrations as they have become: bloated, indiscriminate, and rolled out at scale with all the thoughtfulness of a software update.
The problem isn’t just scale. It’s philosophical. At some point a ritual stops meaning anything because it is asked to mean too much, too often, for too many people. That point, for birthdays, has already been crossed.
I am fifty-two. At this age, birthdays are no longer awaited events. They are ambient noise. Every day it is someone’s birthday. Someone in my orbit, anyway. A colleague. A nephew. A friend. A dear friend of a dear friend.
Social media has expanded those orbits and turned up the volume. Birthdays once required memory. Or at least effort. Now they arrive as prompts, alerts, and pre-written messages. You are not asked to care; you are asked to comply. One tap. Job done.
The group chat is where whatever sincerity remains in birthday felicitations goes to suffocate. One person notices first. They announce it. The rest pile in, not out of joy but out of obligation. Nobody wants to be the one who said nothing. Silence here is no longer neutral; it is treated as a pointed act.
The result is not celebration. It is signalling. A ritual designed for intimacy has been repurposed for broadcast, and in the process rendered weightless.
Which means the rules need revising.
New Rule: Birthdays may only be celebrated by people who would notice your absence if you failed to show up to dinner. Ordinary dinner. On a weekday. Anyone outside this category is not being rude by staying silent. They are simply complying with the Social Contract, as amended hereby.
Expectations to the contrary should be actively resisted. Acts performed in service of such expectations should be discouraged, then quietly stamped out. This is not vindictive. It is preventive. The most effective way to change expectations is to deprive them of oxygen.
Group acknowledgements should be abolished outright. Well-wishers must act privately, if at all. You do not stand up in a restaurant and shout “happy birthday” at the person you are dining with, then turn expectantly to the surrounding tables to follow suit. Carbon-copying one’s thoughtfulness is not kindness; it is performance.
WhatsApp, in its next iteration, should simply remove any community or group member who wishes another a happy birthday, whether by word, gif, emoji, or sticker. This, incidentally, is exactly the sort of thing artificial intelligence ought to be doing by now.
If this sounds excessive, consider the trajectory we are on. Life-extending peptides and proteins are already proliferating. Longevity is accelerating. Soon enough, centenarians will spend the better part of their remaining years wishing people happy birthday. Entire afternoons will be lost. Global productivity will crater and civilization, as we know it, will buckle under the weight of so-called good intentions.
Like any currency issued without restraint, birthday wishes have collapsed through inflation. Their abundance has rendered them worthless.
This New Rule should therefore be adopted without delay. Failing that, more severe measures may become unavoidable. History suggests that humanity corrects excess either voluntarily or catastrophically. It would be a shame if something as trivial as birthdays were what finally pushed us toward the latter.
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