Happy Birthday

An examination of the meaning of birthday's and how they alter throughout the journey of life.

Birthdays are a damn funny thing……..

A web of contradictions and selective chronology, today marks my Twenty Fifth Birthday, I have reached my quarter of a century pit stop in the racing track of life. Hardly cause for alarm. And yet still presenting a reminder �" I’m one year down in my number of allotted calendar spans on the wall of existence.

 

It’s an oddity how our individual and collective attitudes to birthday celebration contrast with one another, depending on how far along the road one is of course.  When we are children a birthday almost feels like an achievement. Today I am Ten! Well done, have some cake then and do be quiet…… We greet birthdays as welcome signification that we are “growing up” and in our immature childish minds imagine this should mean we can now be taken seriously. People never grow up, not really. They get taller and their voices change… On the inside we are all that same then year old; stomping our foot and demanding some unearned respect from our peers. No. We don’t “grow up”; we just learn to cultivate the necessary artifice to exist as part of this “adult” world we view with such ridiculous adulation.

Of course, by consequence this means that nobody is ever truly taken seriously either. Rather those that are of a vested interest in appeasing people in certain positions of power (for their own ends entirely) learn to appear to grant them utter respect. The very adult oh so mature working world we all bang on about finds it’s foundations upon the most childish petty principles.

 

When we hit our teens, birthday definition again undergoes another conversion. It becomes about attainment. Attainment of a certain status, particular rights to do certain things. Like consuming alcohol until your eyes bleed, having sexual intercourse until anatomical elements of an entirely more sensitive nature also bleed.

With each passing teenage birthday as the second number in that one-something increases, so too does the amount of belligerence. The need to rebel, often for no particularly good reason, The Parents we looked so eagerly to for approval previously. Relying on them to pat us on the head and say well done are transformed. They are viewed no longer as the symbol of our achievement, but the face we give to our supposed trappings. They are there to hold us back; they won’t let us have that can of larger. They advise against the pursuit of sexual exploration when we are just entering puberty. And in our eyes this isn’t because they are more experienced in the perilous pitfalls of life and just might know better…. It’s because they’re old! What do they know? They don’t understand us, in fact nobody does. The whole world is wrong and we are right, when in our teens we think that life and the world in general is such a drag………

Of all the facets of this particular step on the road in the annals of birthday-dom the misconceptions detailed above are the most tragic, and by far the most annoying. It’s almost as if when you arrive in your teens someone steals your brain and refuse to return it until your twenties….. The voice of youth is so very loud and now more than ever so very heard in our society. And yet seldom speaks anything other than misguided, misinformed, self interested dross!

One truly does feel that the nation needs to collectively stand up and say “Shut up! You are a child! Now don’t speak again until your eighteenth birthday! At least….”

 

When one arrives in the latter teens to early twenties another change now manifests itself. We are now gripped by the pressing need to be “grown up” a reflection of the childish endeavours of the little boy or girl inside ourselves as alluded to earlier.

We go out and buy ourselves a nice smart suit and get sensible hair cuts. We carry ourselves up straight abandoning the uniform slouch of the teen. Embroiling ourselves in self deception and sycophancy we get jobs and make ourselves reverent to the almighty wage. For this is the means by which we can obtain more status symbols by which our level of accelerated evolution can be measured, how “grown up” the wage affords us the opportunity to be. We can have our own home, wash and dress ourselves and everything…..

Birthdays themselves at this point degenerate, they no longer hold the significance they did throughout childhood and the following teens. During this period they are basically reduced to little more than an excuse to consume vast amounts of alcohol until our ears hum and projectile vomiting is induced. For it is then, when “socialising” �" the grown up word we give to acting like a moron. That we are permitted to behave and exist as our true selves, momentarily free of the adult world, and what can we learn from this? Our behaviour when “on the lash” reflects the point invoked previously. Our endeavours in this adult world are but a self deception to instil some desperately desired sense of achievement. We are all just toddlers in designer clothing……

 

There is a small contingency (though it’s on the rise alas) of people who don’t care to enter into the adult world. While the adult world is doubtless a big lie, it’s a necessary one: like telling kids that Santa is real or telling pregnant women that they are “blooming”. We all play the adult game because we need to in order to get along with life. Those that don’t basically are an extension of the teenage philosophy I described earlier, they continue to bemoan their incompatibility with the world, or rather by their terms it’s incompatibility with them….

These individuals would have people believe that they are somehow superior to the rest of us. They see themselves as the only people who “get it” and by hanging on to their adolescence they feel that they are somehow proving something. They are wrong. All their actions truly demonstrate is their failure to accept responsibility for themselves and their decisions. True adulthood is a dressing up game and its okay to know that. But to refuse to even participate marks these people out as little more than redundant non contributory pariahs of life…..

 

In my own particular time line I go no further (yet) than I have thus far contextualised here. I have however spent most of my life surrounded by those older than me, in some cases twenty or thirty years older. In others far more even than that.

 

It seems to me that as one moves further ahead arriving in the arena of the late thirties, birthdays alter once more in their meaning. They begin to become unwelcome reminders that you aren’t as young as you used to be, that time to waste is not in as great as supply as it was the year previously.

Those around you continue to earmark each “celebration” with the customary gifts, cards, parties…. Obliviously entrapped in ritualistic patterns that we all mirror. I still remember my father arriving home on his fortieth reminder to find that his well meaning mother had adorned the front of the house with a “40 TODAY” banner, thus advertising his arrival at one of the male’s most unwelcome morality checks. Horrified, he tore it down and suitably admonished Grandmother…..

To the elderly what can a birthday represent, but a terrifying reminder of the inevitability of death? The fact that; the reaper now has far less of a distance to traverse to catch you up, and even if you tried to outrun him what good would it do? You’re out of breath after a toilet trip these days, and the only time that you even attempt to make haste is to attend to one….

But of course I make this observation through the tint of the blissful ignorance of youth; who knows? Perhaps each passing year simply eases the burden of acceptance that all things eventually reach their conclusion. Perhaps you look back on all the fun you had and tell yourself you can’t complain….

 

However; as I sit here looking through my tint. I can’t quite bring myself to believe that comforting little lie.

I bet you look back and wonder what it was all for, what exactly you got out of it, and where any of it got you.

Life is built on self deception and lies but has to end, ultimately in the acceptance of the ultimate of truths; we all die.

 

Author's Note

I wrote this a few years ago and have mellowed considerably since. I don't necessarily believe all you read here anymore. But still find it an entertaining little article. To be received with a bit of flippancy.