Result Of Showing My Birthday On Facebook

December 29, 2013

While we’re putting a finishing bow on talk of Facebook,

I said earlier this year that I for once was going to allow my birthday month and day to be visible on my profile and that I’d report back how it went. I never reported back, so I’ll go ahead and do that now.

It was exactly as ridiculous as I’d expected!

A bunch of empty happy birthday messages. Many didn’t even say my name in them. Even of the ones that said my name practically none of them said anything other than “Happy birthday, Aurora.”

Who am I to judge, really? What do I do for these people on their birthdays? But I’m just saying… Do you know how much extra time it takes to type something like “My favorite part of your year was ____” or “I’m celebrating you today because you’re so _____.” It takes like an extra minute!

If you’re already on Facebook and you’re already taking 20 seconds to write happy birthday, why don’t you just take 60 seconds more and say something that means something?

One person – who I didn’t even remember by the way, and am pretty sure I don’t even really know – literally just wrote “HBD.” What?! You don’t even know me, yet you feel the need to write HBD? I sort of feel like that’s worse than nothing at all.

I’m sure some people’s arguments of why they can’t write more than just “Happy birthday” is, “If I took an extra 60 seconds for each friend who has a birthday, that’s 10 extra minutes a day. That’s 3,650 minutes a year! That’s over 6 hours just on wishing people happy birthday!

Okay, well, here’s an idea – don’t wish all of your billions of Facebook friends happy birthday. Perhaps think about limiting it to the people you actually sort of know or even care about.

Of course, this is just my opinion. Some people would be sad if they didn’t get a million empty happy birthday messages on Facebook. I thought that that volume would make me feel so special, but it definitely didn’t.

Though, I will admit that any actual fan of mine – someone whom I didn’t know before I started blogging and who originally started following me because they were interested in my projects and my life – I thought each happy birthday they gave was special, even if it was just a few words.

A fan going even that bit of an extra inch to care about you and remember you seems like they’re already doing hard work. But to me, a friend doing that makes me think, “Uh, friend up a little!”

Also, I know this is probably hypocritical and maybe doesn’t make sense… But I also loved all tweets I got from anyone.

I completely ignored most of the Facebook messages, thinking “I’m not gonna go comment or like your thing that you just did on auto-pilot.” Yet, I’m pretty sure I favorited every single tweet. Tweets are precious and lovely.

Maybe my thinking is silly on that. But that’s where I stand. No more Facbeook birthdays. I’d rather have three messages from friends who actually remember and care than three million “happy birthday” alerts from acquaintances coming at me all day long.

Maybe that’s not showing a grateful enough attitude… I do want to be a grateful person. But, come on. At least someone out there has to be with me on this, yeah?

I'd love to hear from you! So whaddya say?