What If Birthdays Weren’t About You, but About Others?

Here’s a quick thought experiment for you

Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash

We don’t have Thanksgiving in the UK but, if I ignore the shopping hysteria around it, I like the fundamental concept.

We so rarely stop to consider the things and people we are thankful for. Even with today’s trend for gratitude journals, how often do we really pause and consider how we got to where we are?

A quick look at birthdays

Birthday celebrations seemed to have begun, in a fairly loose sense, in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome.

But regardless of where they began, they’ve reached fairly epic proportions. These days I know people who have birthday weekends and some who have birthday weeks.

And I don’t necessarily disagree with this. I mean, life is for celebrating after all. But I wonder if we should start treating our birthdays a little differently.

The idea that a birthday is a day all about you is kind of…I don’t know…weird? We tend to live our lives centred around ourselves, we buy ourselves the things we want when we can, we talk about ourselves, stick our activities on social media and generally scream ‘ME’ into the world.