The birthday binary

Ageing is either a wild pantomime of over-the-top celebration or a dismissive shrug of the shoulders. Both are confusing.
3 mins read

I am slowly losing my sense of how to navigate birthdays. It feels like, depending on what age it is you’re turning, there are two, increasingly opposite, attitudes that people take. Both of which are kind of disorienting.

The first is a sort of feverish, hysterical quality to the way in which people insist that your birthday gets celebrated.

“Oh no you must do something special,” they’ll plead. As though memorialising your increasingly saggy ears and that annoying slack bit under your jawline is the equivalent of surviving some Australian game show where the object is to not get eaten by an outback croc, but the game is that you must snog one of them for 20 minutes with a wet fish in your mouth. We’re encouraged to constantly push the boundaries of the window that constitutes “your birthday”, stretching it out to “birthday weeks”, or even months, making the celebration of your continued presence on earth feel less like an amiable pat on the back and more like you’ve just won the World Cup of Still Being Alive.

The other is a kind of comically blank indifference that feels specifically designed to make you feel like a desperate narcissist for even caring about something as ephemeral and meaningless as going around the sun one more time. These are the people who will send you a WhatsApp that literally only says “HBD” and then maybe a confetti emoji if you’re lucky. Facebook has optimised this lack of enthusiasm for the idea of wishing someone a happy birthday by making this an option on a drop-down menu, so that sending a birthday message literally doesn’t require anything more emotionally and physically taxing than a single mouse click.  

I come from a family that has always resolutely, and almost as a matter of principle, refused to make any more fuss about birthdays than one would about a decent cup of tea or a Golden Delicious that doesn’t have the texture of a foam mattress. The one year that an attempt to do some kind of Actual Celebration was made (a weekend away my Dad had organised with some friends), I came down so severely with tick-bite fever the night before that I had to stay behind while he awkwardly tried to figure out what the hell to do for 48 hours with a dozen kids he barely knew. I’m pretty sure he invented a “game” that involved hacking down a large swathe of non-indigenous trees with pangas. Divorced dads could get away with some insane shit back then.

About-turn

I can only imagine how frustrating and confusing it must have been for partners and friends who didn’t understand where my indifference to any kind of celebration came from, and who clearly thought I was just being a deliberately contrarian asshole. The truth is, for the longest time I just didn’t know how to birthday, which meant constantly trying to fend off people trying to ambush me with birthday cakes and balloons. For years I was deeply out of synch with everyone who wanted to make a fuss.

Then one day things changed. It’s not too difficult to pinpoint what did it. It gets a bit boring to sit year after year pretending that a cheesecake at the Hyde Park Seattle is actually a birthday party. Now I wanted the fuss. I wanted to be lifted shoulder-high in the town square and unswervingly praised as someone of impeccable taste and distinction for no other reason than I’ve invited you to my party and you have to. So, I leaned in. I became the person who insisted on pool parties and outings and large, frenzied gatherings with 20 different kinds of salami on platters. The university rock band I played in was re-formed for a two-city tour to celebrate one of those birthdays that everyone insists is a milestone. It was a dizzying 180° turn.   

The truth is that these extremes can’t really be sustained either way. Being a perpetual birthday grinch is like loudly insisting at every possible opportunity that cheese is gross and here’s why. And demanding to be celebrated like a newly minted emperor every year is a short-cut to everyone you know being mysteriously away whenever you send out the annual invitations for Jono’s Bday JAM5000.

For whatever reason (I think geopolitics maybe has something to do with it?), we seem to be back in a “celebrate like you’re the Sun King” phase. I don’t mind – happy to be sort of mildly on the sidelines, somewhere between being conceptually programmed to give birthdays the same amount of attention you’d give a used tissue, to feeling the creeping thrill of its approach. Even if there is nothing particularly exciting planned for it. 

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Jono Hall

Award-winning filmmaker, writer, and cartoonist Jono Hall started his professional career as a multi-hyphenate “radio DJ-drummer for a quasi-famous rock band-magazine editor-pop-up restauranteur-taxidermist”. Though this isn’t a real career, it has given him a deep well of dinner-party conversation. His recent short film, Awake, has won a multitude of awards across the world and his first Netflix series will debut early next year.

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