Why do we celebrate birthdays?

What’s so great about birthdays, huh?

As it turns out, nothing, actually. The same can be said for all days that we celebrate. In the greater timescale of the Universe, Sun and Earth, our birthdays are nothing.

If the frequency of birthdays celebrated by an ant, whose total lifespan (for a queen ant) is about 12 years, is taken to be equal to that of those celebrated by us humans, then ants would have to have birthdays almost every month.

I’d like to think we celebrate birthdays because they’re important to us. We keep counting the years we’ve lived, even though we spend our days as if we’d never die.

Humans and irony go well together in more ways than one, though I wouldn’t like to make this an academic piece of writing by citing examples and whatnot.

Instead, I’d like to go into the philosophy of it all, and in the context of birthday celebrations. The “Happy Birthday” song that we all sing on someone’s birthday is actually copyrighted. So you could be tried in court for singing that song.

But do we stop singing it? No way.

There are many things we do knowing that the consequences will not be to our liking. Yet we do them, either out of ignorance (as in the case of the “Happy Birthday” song) or for the thrill of it all.

I’d always want to celebrate my birthday with those people whom I’ve known for a long time. In other words, less people is better, even though I wouldn’t want to leave anybody out.

A long time ago, when I was littler, celebrating birthdays used to be something that was very easy to do. Nobody had any hard feelings, and there was no ordeal involved.

But it’s all different now. People take things to heart if they’re not invited. And because of that one thing, they stop being friends. They call such a person ‘rude’, but what’s so rude in not inviting everybody to a birthday party.

You couldn’t even call it a party if it’s between four to five friends. It’d just be a get-together. And besides, friends made a week or two before a birthday party are rarely invited to it if one wants to only invite the closest friends.

The main takeaway is that if you’re not invited to someone’s birthday party, you don’t have to care. In fact, you don’t have to change your plans if you were planning to invite this person to your birthday party.

Trust me on this: the other person would deeply appreciate the gesture, and you’d probably be invited to their birthday party next year.