Why I hide my birthday on social media
Of course everyone loves the birthday greetings -- as long as that's from their heart.
How many birthdays do you remember without writing down or using tool? Kid’s, partner’s, and best friend’s. Maybe just one digit number of them you can remember.
Our memory is not so good that you only remember one's birthday you care. You carefully pick up persons you want to remember. Because your memory space is so precious that you just want to remember the birthday the most important to you.
So if someone remembers your birthday (a day in a year), you must be an important person to them.
But now birthday greetings becomes *cheap*. Social media will tell you whose birthday is coming in few days. You no longer can tell whether you are important to someone or not -- maybe they just see the birthday reminder popped up from the news feed and they just clicked it.
Compared to the disregard, the greeting routine makes me more depressed.
I was born in July. If your birthday is also in summer vacation, you then know what I mean. Students are out of school and nobody celebrates your birthday with you.
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Few years ago, while social media started to pop up birthday reminder, I got near 100 greetings on a social media (out of 500 friends). I was so happy. I was always ignored in the school time because of the summer vacation.
Then I spent more than 1 hour to reply thanks -- for each one -- because I was really thankful to get the greetings. In addition to that, for each person, I replied different messages according to their latest status.
Unfortunately, only few of them replied to me. Most people were just ignoring my message and seemed nothing had happened ever.
I even wondered that's my problem -- I didn't pick up the right topic or they were just not in the mood?
The next year, I had more friends on the social media. I got 200 greetings. Again, I spent 2+ hours to reply customized thank-you messages.
Again, I got silence from most of them.
Then I started wondering if they are sincerely. For them, that might be a routine. Just like you say "How's going" to everyone you meet in the office or on the street. You don't really want to know if others are doing well or not. You just want to be polite -- or to look like you are polite.
Then, I felt enough. I hide my birthday from social media as much as I can.
Then, my wife forgot my birthday next year. LOL
