6 Things I Like About Birthdays

I turn 40 today, or as the vast majority of people seem to call it, “The Big 4-O.” With the first digit changing this birthday feels a bit more significant than others, but also in a lot of ways it’s full of the same things I’ve come to expect and enjoy from all of the birthdays that came before.

I know some people dislike celebrating birthdays, but I’m generally a fan. Here are a few things I like about birthdays:

1. A natural moment for self-reflection

At the risk of stating the most obvious thing ever, my birthday occurs on the same day ever year, and I’m pretty certain yours does too. The point of saying that is to say that it’s a lot easier to remember what my life was like on my birthday in any given year vs. some random day like May 13.

I think it’s a gift that we have this natural way to mark the passage of time. I think it’s wild that it means the planet we are on has made a journey around the sun and come back to generally the same place in the universe. And I think it’s fun to take stock of the journey I’ve personally made in the past year, and how that contributes to the story of my life, and to think a bit about where I think I’d like to head in the next year.

2. A chance to update the Life Soundtrack

In college, inspired by John Cusack’s character Rob in High Fidelity who organizes his record collection autobiographically, I came up with the concept of creating a 20-song Life Soundtrack that one could listen to with important people new to your life as a way to learn each others’ stories. It was an arbitrary number that fit because we were roughly 20 years old, and though I ignored the question of how it would stay updated as we aged because I was young and how would that ever even happen?, turning 40 provided a perfect opportunity to refresh it.

The songs don’t have to be your favorite songs—just the ones that got scratched into your soul. Songs that instantly remind you of a moment, or a time period, or a place, or a person, or a mood, or an experience. To get from my 20-year-old soundtrack to 40, some of those old songs definitely had to stay (like George Harrison’s "I’ve Got My Mind Set on You”, the first song I ever liked as a kid), but many others had to go, either in favor of something from a more significant recent experience, or because something that felt vital and important to me in my twenties wasn’t relevant anymore. One thing that definitely happened was that two or three songs sometimes turned into one that encapsulated several years—when you’re 21, the nuances between 15 and 16 and 17 and 18 are immense; when you’re 40, years blend together a lot easier.

I think you should try putting one together, even if it’s not 20 songs, and listen to it with someone you care about—that experience has always been powerful for me, whether it’s my soundtrack or someone else’s.

Anyway, I’ll be drumming along to the new soundtrack tomorrow, and I’m happy to listen to it with you if you’re ever interested, but for now I’ll just share a few of the new additions from the past 20 years that you can play while you read:

3. Balloons

My neighbor Melanie, who is in her 80s, got me this along with a card assuring me that the next 4o years are the most fun:

If you forget to smile and appreciate the current moment, a balloon can always be there to not-so-subtly remind you.

4. Going to the movies

In 1994 my 10th birthday party was a trip to see Hilary Swank kick some ass inThe Next Karate Kid, and this year my old ass saw My Old Ass, a fun and thoughtful meditation on aging in which Maisy Stella’s 18-year-old character meets her 39-year-old future self played by Aubrey Plaza. It was a cool movie to see in my last days of being 39, and it raised interesting questions about what advice the myself of each age would have to offer to the other selves. (As with the movie, that advice goes in both directions.)

I’m also going to see Transformers One, an animated prequel where Optimus Prime and Megatron are friends. I’m going with friends of many ages, including the age I was when I was most into Transformers, and I think that will be a cool experience too.

5. The forced attention of a celebration

I asked Kelly what she liked best about birthdays and she instantly screamed, “Oh, the attention!”

This tracks, coming from a child who once wrote her family a note during a Broncos game asking for “a attention” because “she felt like a piece of trash” that everyone was watching the game instead of playing with her.

I get why Kelly loves a attention, but I don’t always love a attention so I very much appreciate being forced to appreciate people paying a attention to me. Kelly also made sure to clarify that she also loves focusing attention on the birthday person, because “It’s cool to just have a day where you fucking just celebrate being alive.”

6. Celebrating being alive

My plans for this week were to do as many of the things I love doing in my everyday with as many of the people in my life as I could. I felt like that was the way I wanted to honor the person I am right now after all of these years of experience, especially because my last year has been spent experiencing a lot of things.

Over the past month, as people kept asking me how I felt about The Big 4-O, I found myself giving what I felt was a cliched answer: “It’s better than the alternative.” It kinda felt like a dad joke, which might just be something that comes with the onset of middle age.

The thing is, it was a dad joke in that The Big 4-0 is a round number that makes it easy to do the math that I’m now 80% of the age my dad was when he died, and I’ve thought a lot about that, and that’s why I kept spouting the cliche—because I mean it. I don’t want to take getting older for granted because there are no guarantees, and because all of us know someone who didn’t get enough birthdays.

Memento mori, the Stoic philosophers said, “Remember that you will die.” It’s not the most fun thing to think about the fact that it’s something that every person before us has done, and that we don’t seem to have figured out how to avoid it yet, but I do believe thinking about it can be a useful thing, because when I start thinking about depressing math like this, I also think of the lesson from this fantastic article on depressing math:

"There’s nothing stopping us from changing that equation … These two delusions — that we have countless time ahead of us and that we can’t change our course — are a recipe for complacency. Shedding them can wake us up and inspire us to live more wisely.”

May this birthday, and every birthday, wake us up and inspire us to live more wisely.

Want to celebrate your birthday? Is it Life Soundtrack listening time? jed@kindandfunny.com.