Birthdays are special days in the year, and nearly impossible to ignore. Even the most starch anti-birthdayer is fully aware of the annual occurrence of their Birthday. I think the orienting power of a Birthday should not be ignored or overlooked. Like every holiday, these days are the ritualized incarnation of a point in the past (in this instance, one’s birth), and the repetition of it informs us of our sense of cyclical time. Just as the year begins January 1st, 00:00, and serves as a temporal anchor for society on a global scale, birthdays act as an individual starting point for one’s personal narrative, and in some cases a period of reflection and perhaps regeneration for the self. In this post, I hope to play around with the idea of the Birthday, and the power that a Birthday may hold in one’s individual calendar, and consequently, their sense of self.
A holiday is in its most fundamental sense the repetition of something that is deemed noteworthy, and by annually remembering it one draws attention to the power that the original event holds in a social structure. Dates like July 4th and December 25th are responsible dates for constructing national and religious world views. These dates mark the founding of a particular system and are celebrated as ways to affirm the identities of those who they represent. As stated in the opening paragraph here, Jan. 1 represents this on the most macro scale, a date that everyone has agreed on to start the new year. By acknowledging and celebrating this date one is agreeing to be part of a global social system - a system that acknowledges 12 months that begins on the first of January. January 1st, in a sense, is the celebration of belonging to a global calendar. This is perhaps the most uniting and global holiday, but there are very much are people on this planet that do not acknowledge this paramount calderical system. However, most people do, and through this, world views are constructed through a very set, measurable, and globally expansive sense of fixed time.
Opposite to this however is the Birthday. The Birthday is personal and thought individualized. And even though there are 365 days in which 8 billion need to split up their special days (that’s 21,917,808 million per day if there were equal b-day distribution, which there is not), a birthday still feels personal and unique. Yes, you maybe share your birthday with a couple of other acquaintances, but the day is still yours (single 2nd person), not yours (plural 2nd person). Perhaps this is different for twins and triplets of the world. But regardless, your Birthday is the orienting period of time in your life, whether you care about it or not. The Birthday feels special because it is the marker of how you understand yourself in time in relation to a global calendar.
The Birthday is a yearly marker that recognizes the day on which you were born. While this is by no means a profound statement, I think that some social implications of the birth date are often overlooked as being significant; birthdays tend to be best understood as a given without much analysis. Birthplace tends to be a much more hefty role - the birthplace is responsible for the rationale behind social constructions such as national identity as well as granting legal privileges like citizenship. One’s worldview is often constructed based on the place where they were born and the implications of that space; one frames their understanding of the world and self in contexts relative to their birthplace (e.g. I am American because I was born in America). While I do think that space has more of a significant role than time when discussing birth, I think that birth date still aids in constructing and developing individual worldviews. For example, if one were to be born in January, they understand their age corresponds to the length of a year, that for the majority of time in a year they are a certain age. As a September birthday haver, I have historically associated my birthday (and consequently age), with the academic year, as my birthdays would always be within the first 3 weeks of a school year. I found this to always be advantageous because I would always be meeting new people and therefore a birthday celebration could be a nice way to bring strangers together. And don’t get me started with the perverse self-view that arises if one were to be born on Feb 29.
What I am trying to say here is that the relationship between one’s birth date and the time of year is responsible for how one understands yearly time. This can consequently affect behavior and sense of self, because one’s social placement within the year is relative to one’s birthday, and this is how the year is understood. To be more straightforward, my thesis is that one tends to perceive self-time in relationship to their birthdate. Let me use myself as an example once again. Because I have a September Birthday my personal temporal placement in the year is September. This means that my age for that year is based on that September date. Consequently, October, or my 1/12th b-day, marks the occasion where I have been a new age for one month, and August, my 11/12th b-day, marks the last month of my current age. March, the month of my ½ birthday is the exact middle of my current age. These dates should not be ignored - human beings think a lot about their age and aging, so the fact that these months become personal based on their relationship to your birthday does have some psychological implications. I know that August for me is period of reflection due to an impending change of age. And so much of September and early October is me adjusting to and trying on my new age. So basically, one’s birthday frames how one experiences a year.
Birth months thereby can have social and psychological implications as well. I’ve taken to asking people how they feel about their birth month and I feel like the responses I have gotten do reveal that birth month is something that people think a fair amount about. I had a conversation with some November birthday-ers recently and they said that November is a rather existential time to have a birthday because the year is wrapping up which results in one needing to reflect on their past year, but there are no festivities that one might find, for example with a December Birthday. An August B-day friend said that she loves a summer birthday because people tend to have more free time and it’s really easy to host a gathering in a park or on the beach due to the nice weather. January Birthdays tend to be less than ideal because people have a holiday hangover and are broke, so their celebrations are often overlooked. Birth season, definitely affects how one understands their celebratory days, a winter b-day is very different than a summer b-day. And then you also add other elemental factors to Birth months, such as Birthstones and birth flowers, which are kinda strange little things when you think about it, but nonetheless do personalize the date on which one was born.
Now, this brings me to maybe the most interesting discussion of my ponderings regarding this topic, and that is horoscopes. Based on my hypothesis that birthdays are orienting time which affects world views and sense of self, it seems reasonable to extrapolate that maybe a reason why people with the same star sign display similar social behavior is because they have a shared sense of calendrical time. The logic behind astrological behavior is not in fact based on the stars themselves but rather based on how individuals born around the same period understand time from the fixed point of their birthday. Perhaps the reason Scorpios are viewed as being intense is that the November birthday is an existential month. And maybe the Virgo is thought to be organized and perfectionistic because our birthdays correspond with the beginning of the academic year where structure and responsibility are heavily emphasized by teachers and parents since birth. I’m not trying to say that this is definitely true, but I do think that if we were to agree horoscopes can be valid and result in proper descriptors of people, then this could be one factor in explaining it sociologically.
Birthdays are important. They are responsible for marking our age, they are days that allow us to celebrate and reflect, and they help form our identities. The reason I wrote this is to suggest that maybe birthdays have some hidden powers, that birthdays are responsible for how we understand ourselves in relationship within a greater temporal system, just as birthplace is responsible for how we understand ourselves within a greater geographical system. And because of this, I think that there should be more emphasis on the power birthdays have in how we define and understand ourselves.
Comments