This Slate article by David Plotz is causing a pretty big uproar. In it, he describes how he changed his birthday on Facebook to three different days in the same month just to see who was paying attention and who would wish him a happy birthday every time. Not surprisingly, more than a few people fell for it.

It reminded me of what I said about birthdays around the time of my own last May when I put Your Birthday on the list.

Thanks for the well wishes. It is in fact amazing that I still exist. In fairness, I can’t help but notice that you exist as well, but I don’t want to get into a whole thing about you on account of this being my special little day. Better save the congratulations until the officially sanctioned period recognizing the approximate ten hours it took for you to sluice out of your mother’s vagina. If you and like 12 people we all sort of know want to go sit in a restaurant and ruin everyone else’s night around us, I’m cool with that though.

I have sort of a bittersweet existential response to birthday wishes and Facebook on the whole. It’s nice to be recognized as a human being who exists in the world, right? After all, isn’t that the exact reason we go on Facebook every day in the first place? To broadcast our personhood and have it validated back to us? It’s like we’re all these lonely little submarines deep under water sending out a sonar signal that bounces back off of the other ships around us to let us know we’re not navigating through the void alone. So in that sense, sure, thanks for briefly, however superficially, realizing that I live and breathe, and testifying to that fact in front of all the witnesses gathered here today.

I recognize the impulse myself. If a friend was having a birthday party, I might feel like I have to show up for it just to be seen. Only this is a much easier party to attend, and I don’t even have to buy my friend a beer.

Birthday wishes are just kind of fraught with social anxiety in general. Even before Facebook, my friends would always text me on my birthday and it would make me feel more guilty than anything else. Like, “Oh no, did I text this person on their birthday? Are they winning at being friends now?”

When it was my birthday on Facebook, I got something like 8 million notes from people I barely know, some casual acquaintances and a handful of real world friends. Every single time it popped up and I got a notice in my email, I was annoyed. It was like another bit of homework to delete the email and go obliterate that horrible red number from the top of my profile page. And the further removed I was from this person in actual friendship, the more annoying it was.

The whole time I was sitting there being pissy about it though, I couldn’t help but think, “You know, I would probably be feeling pretty shitty if no one had said anything at all. I wonder what it’s like to be one of those losers?”

Michael Epstein, a Facebook friend of mine, did a thing where he changed his birthday to every day for like a year or something. I thought that was pretty annoying to see everyday, but I also appreciated the point he was making, which was that robotically punching in to the celebration factory to do your job on the happiness assembly line is dehumanizing, impersonal and ridiculous.

That’s a worthy concept, and only slightly different than the point that I’m trying to make myself:

The only thing worse than being overly recognized on your birthday is not being recognized at all.

Oh, and we’re still all going to die alone.

-LUKE O’NEIL
PutThatShitontheList.com
@LukeONeil47