My phone's calendar, I realized, is filled with birthdays of the people I've met.
Well, most of them. I haven't done that with the people I work with, but that's because it's a weird question to ask. The only time you are allowed to ask that question is when you're in elementary school, perhaps when you have a crush on someone and want to make their day special. These days you just wait for someone to make the first greeting on a group chats, and wait to see if the supposed celebrator responds with a "thank you" rather than an "actually, it isn't my birthday today".
What I do have are birthdays from the people I've met in college, and even then I didn't always ask about when they were born. There was this list of the birthdays and mobile numbers of everyone in my block, which our upperclassmen "lambassadors" helpfully compiled for us during orientation week. And then there was Facebook, which was new roughly twenty years ago (yep), which meant people were still excited to put their birthdays in and get an avalanche of greetings on the day.
That stopped being fun after a while. At some point you'll realize you're hearing from people you wouldn't otherwise hear from the rest of the year, and, well, isn't that a bit disingenuous? Isn't it like hearing back from someone who haven't talked to for years only to ask you to like a social media post, or worse, join an MLM? Or is it just me?
Sure, you can argue that saying "happy birthday" is the least you could do to keep whatever tenuous threads you have with other folks connected. Be a decent person and give the greeting. But even then it feels weird to be the person who doesn't say hello to other people for all but one day a year - and even then, it's just a two-word greeting, or worse, a three-letter one. It's why I haven't myself - not unless you're a person I talk to with relative frequency in the past year or so, or someone whose friendship has stood the test of time (depending on my mood at any given point). Or, well, if I kinda want something from you. Let's face it. We've all been there.
The birthdays on my calendar are attached to their phone numbers. I'm pretty sure half of the numbers on my phonebook aren't the right ones anymore. Sure, people don't really text people these days. That excitement - also from twenty years ago or so - has long passed. If you're friends on Facebook, they're a quick search away, unless they changed their name to a weird combination of letters for some reason. Messenger is the bare minimum now. If you're to talk outside of that social media behemoth (although not really, in WhatsApp's case) then you need their mobile number saved on your device. Only then will you easily find them on Viber, or Telegram, or whatever the kids are into these days. And even then you don't really spend hours talking to people on an app. You meet up for coffee. Well, that was two years ago, and even then it happened rarely.
Yes, people drift apart and priorities change. I know. It sucks, but I know, okay? I should really be cleaning up my phonebook, in any case. And many other things, for that matter.
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