Unhappy birthday to me: How Facebook ruined my big day

It’s never nice to admit you’re jealous of a baby, but they don’t always make it easy. In the year and a half my son has been around, he’s celebrated like five or six birthdays? I can’t even keep up.

There was a stupid photo shoot when he turned one month old involving a baby notice board that said, “Today I am one month old!” The same thing happened again at six months, then nine months, and, of course, an enormous party for his actual first birthday.

Last week, he turned 18 months old, and I received several texts wishing him well for this made-up milestone. “Happy 18-month birthday, little man!” wrote one friend who had forgotten my birthday for the last three years.

The worst part of being an adult? No one cares about your birthday. Credit: Thomas Mitchell.

Sadly, I have no idea when my friend’s birthday is either (feels like a May guy?), so I can’t be mad; it’s just how things are for Adult Birthdays. Birthdays are cute when you’re a kid, and everyone rightly wants to know about them. Unfortunately, the older we get, the less likely it becomes that people find out it is your birthday and the stranger it becomes to make them aware of your birthday.

Thankfully, we didn’t have to worry about any of that for a long time because Mark Zuckerberg was doing the heavy lifting. Facebook became the stopgap for a generation that didn’t stress about remembering birthdays because, well, Facebook never let us forget.

Suddenly, every day was someone’s birthday, and we generously dished out our well-wishes.

That weird guy you met in a Spanish hostel in 2014? Feliz cumpleaños, Carlos! Your high-school nemesis who is now running an essential oil pyramid scheme? Have a good one, Naomi!

Old friends, new friends, weird friends, fake friends, spreading cheer was simple enough that we didn’t discriminate. So reliable was the Facebook birthday method that it became my only form of contact with some people.

My uncle in Queensland was basically non-existent for 364 days, but once a year, every year, he would log on to post the same (slightly intimidating) message – “Another one down, mate” – and I would know he was alive and well – or at least alive.

We took it for granted, and as is often the case, you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. Facebook became deeply uncool, and we migrated away from it en masse, leaving the carcass to our parents (who already know everyone’s birthdays by heart).

For a while, many of us in the 9-to-5 business could at least rely on the dreaded office cake to remember other people’s birthdays or force them to celebrate ours. Anyone who has worked in a corporate environment will be familiar with this depressing ritual: the sweating Coles cake, the unenthusiastic singing, the one person who always says, “Do you want me to serve?”

This stock image is a lie. No office birthday celebration has ever looked like this.Credit: iStock

But even this tradition seems to be on the way out, with many offices condensing the celebrations or cancelling cake altogether. At my work, we now do shared cakes, where everyone born in the same month is celebrated on a single day. Nothing diminishes Your Big Day like splitting a $13 carrot cake with four strangers born around the same time as you.

Does it matter if people don’t remember our birthdays? Well, that depends.

Everyone is a bit weird about their birthday. Plenty claim to hate it, though I’ve always suspected this is a preemptive strike against potential disappointment. It’s easier to pretend you don’t care than admit you might be sad if no one makes you feel special.

Others shamelessly love it, the in-built attention tailor-made for extroverts who crave being celebrated. But most of us land somewhere in the middle – we don’t need every birthday to be unforgettable, but we hope people don’t forget entirely.

No matter where you land on the spectrum, I remain convinced that a call or a text (or a Facebook message from your first high-school boyfriend whose profile picture is a photo of a car) is a gift we should keep giving.

This is probably the ideal time to reveal that it is my birthday next week. Rather than risk any of you forgetting, I thought I’d put it on record in the nation’s most-read masthead. It was either that or posting a photo of me in a giant nappy next to a notice board: Today, I am 35!

Find more of the author’s work here. Email him at [e-mail] or follow him on Instagram at @thomasalexandermitchell and on Twitter @_thmitchell.

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