don't feed the trolls // what are birthdays for? (Patreon)

Most people are into birthdays, even if they’re into not being into birthdays. It’s our earliest and most reliable rite of passage in this shambling rot of a dominant culture whose other rites of passage are kept at the gate by capital and various proofs of our devotion to/investment in it. We are starved for markers of growth. All of the tangled feelings around what a birthday means to somebody find their way in, even if you can manage to put them out of your mind for most of the year.

Today is my birthday.

I was made to understand from a young age that birthdays were for other people. Birthday parties were for guests, and for adults to see that I was doing well. Getting older, at least.

I grew up with the internet. By this I mean, the internet and I, we are the same age. As I became more self-aware, birthdays developed another quality: A kind of existential dance with the ego. They started to give me a sense of where I fit into a social web—by noticing in what manner and by whom I was noticed, on this Day of People Noticing Me. Who noticed me and wanted me to notice? Who wanted other people to notice? Who didn’t want to be noticed for noticing? And the classic follow up thought experiment was “Why?”

Nascent social media was developing around this time too. In addition to my face-to-face social experiences, I became a decorated member on several niche forums, had several websites dedicated to fleeting interests, and talked to friends I’d met online and at school over instant messengers. It was common to use a couple of different messenger applications to account for friends whose parents would only let them download one (somewhat arbitrarily, it seemed). I learned CSS and HTML, and got very good at drawing and photo collaging with a mouse, figured out how to customize the look and feel of my digital space.

I encountered /b/ in middle school. Whether it was on 4chan, 7chan, 12chan, or 7clams, /b/ always seemed to be made up of the same anonymous nomads. It was a different community back then. While there were always people posting awful things, they had no power. It was cyber cowboy country, and the community was somewhat successfully self-moderating when it was smaller, through pretty rudimentary social discouragement like pretending not to notice (This is a real CBT strategy and it is called Planned Ignoring). As the user base grew, I saw the way an unmoderated anonymous space can radicalize the margins and autocannibalize. Whether that was due to calculated divisive action or the raw shadow of man, I shrug.

Humor is powerful. Community is powerful. “People like us do stuff like this.” Seth Godin

Not long after the Habbo Hotel incidents (which bear striking resemblance to social storms whipping up all over the united states...postmodern nazis, loyal and vying for status), that experiment of total social anonymity had drastically and publicly failed. Facebook, which offered the opposite, took off. I made a Facebook account around the end of my senior year of high school, to keep in touch with friends I would soon be physically apart from. I did a 180 into total transparency in my digital space.

Looking back, I found the most joy and freedom on platforms that were somewhere between anonymous and transparent. Platforms that encouraged avatars and code names, that both allowed for creative curation of an aesthetic personhood and carried the weight and reward of accountability for the ways in which I interacted with them.

Anyhow, my relationship with birthdays is complex, but I’ve come around to embrace that early belief that birthdays are for other people, in a way that I no longer resent it, because having a day devoted to others can lead to introspection and personal growth through taking the temperature of the social systems I inhabit. A birthday is a day of giving presence with generosity for those who choose to observe them. A day to ground and dance, with not only your own ego, but the egos of others, hoping the dance will keep the egos busy for a moment.