The real reason why we celebrate birthdays

Have you ever stopped to wonder why we have this traditon that everyone is expected to throw a party at their birthday, inviting guests who bring them presents and congratulate them on having grown older by one year as if it was something to be glad of?

I had actual birthday parties with guests at home until I was 16. After that, I had birthday parties only (with one exception) on those years when I was either living with a girlfriend, or belonged to a group of friends who celebrated each other's birthdays even when the hero of the day was unable to attend – it was just an excuse to party. I enjoyed getting together with people and being merry all right – but in my adult age I found no pleasure in having aged by yet another year. That, and the time when I was getting really cool presents ended sometime around 13.  ;-)

Why do most people enjoy birthdays, or at least act as if they did? I eventually found out the (most likely) reason, but in order to make the reasoning easier for you to follow, I'll start with a few brief stories from my life. For your convenience and their privacy, I have given the participants made-up English names.

I remeber that on his 50th birthday, my father said – after the guests' congratulatory speeches – something to the effect of "dear friends, you said many kind words to me, but the sad truth is that I have grown old". He threw an awesome party all the same.

I remember a later occasion when a former long-time female colleague of mine reached 30 and I decided to call and congratulate her, but I wasn't quite sure if I had written down her birthday correctly, so I called and asked her if this was her 30th birthday. To my surprise, she reacted really offended, and I completed the call quickly and didn't congratulate her after all. It was her 30th birthday all right, I gathered as much, but I had been too clumsy to realise that I wasn't supposed to remind her of her age. Not when a woman gets 30.

Anyway, over the years I found myself wondering a lot why do we celebrate the anniversary of our birth instead of some great events in our life? Obviously your birth hasn't got the slightest to do with you. It's solely the achievement of your parents. Now, a reason to have a party and scream with joy would be, for instance, the anniversary of my very first sex act. Such an event would be a thousand times more a reason to celebrate than something as random (from my point of view) as my birth.

When I shared that thought with a friend of my girlfriend's in one of our frank discussions, she said she couldn't imagine herself visiting a lady friend with a bouquet of flowers and congratulating her on losing her cherry. Figures. Of course women wouldn't be exactly eager to openly celebrate something sexual. But still, there are personal achievements that are perfectly decent. Why don't we celebrate the anniversaries of those?

Now comes the story that helped me put it all together. My uncle Edward (more precisely, the husband of my aunt Julia) had died. He had been among the people I have most admired during my life. I knew he had troubled relationships with his wife and apparently with his younger son Tony, and I had heard about bad things he had done in the past, but that was past. To me he was totally one of the greatest men I've ever had the honour to interact with. I was very happy when I was able to do him a favour or two in the final years in his life. Also it filled my heart with the deepest gratitude when I was allowed to be one of the coffin carriers at his funeral.

My elder cousin Paul's wife Kate hated Uncle Edward. I remember a conversation I had with her where she happened to say casually "Well, you obviously didn't come to Edward's funeral to pay him your respects, did you? You came here to help Julia and Tony and the others to come to terms with his death."

I was dumbfound that she would say such a thing. I had come to the funeral precisely to pay my respects to Uncle Edward. As to Julia and Tony, they were grown-ups, they knew people died. It had never crossed my mind to try and play psychotherapist to them. Apart from which, it had always been obvious they didn't exactly love Uncle Edward. They had more like put up with the inevitability of his presence in their home. Trying to console them was beyond the last thing on my mind.

However, that expression of Kate's, "help them come to terms with", kept echoing somewhere on the edge of my counciousness, and one day it suddenly dawned to me how it was so relevant to an event of a completely different kind. You guessed it – the birthday!!

We visit people on their birthdays and congratulate them and give them presents and be merry with them in order to not give them time to feel the anguish. Birthday celebrations are meant to help people to come to terms with the horrible truth that they are getting older.

This is how it works:

When we are very young, our parents often celebrate not only the passing of years, but even the passing of 1, 2, 3 etc. months from our birth. They have every reason to toast their immense achievement – the mother has actually raised a baby inside her body, and, well, the father has also helped a little bit. To have produced an actual living, sentient being is a miracle, really, when you stop to think about it. So of course the parents want to shout their joy from the rooftops.

When the child gets a little older, he becomes actually aware of his having a birthday once a year. He notices how his parents are so happy on that day and everybody are so kind to him and bring him presents and he gets to eat birthday cake. That pleasant experience is repeated every year and thus getting habitual. Apart from which, a child wants to grow up as quickly as possible, so getting older is really a happy occasion to him. By the time it no longer is, one has this program firmly fixed in one's neuronal connections that birthdays are a cause for merriment, and even when we have some doubts about it, we simply have to organise birthday parties because it's expected of us, it's what people do.

It would take great courage to tell your family and friends: "Look, I have decided to stop celebrating my birthdays, because there is no pleasure in getting older. Instead, I will invite you all over on the anniversary of my graduation from the university, because it is an achievement of my own of which I am really proud." Obviously, people would consider that a little weird. And it is very likely that many people would disregard your decision and continue to congratulate on your birthday – simply because they are celebrating birthdays of their own, and they need their friends to come over and bring them flowers and presents and thereby expel the grief of having gotten older from their minds.

By the way, this theory explains plausibly why women are so crazy about birthdays – to them getting older is a real devastation, so they need this "helping to cope" thing a lot more than we men do.