Birthday Industrial Complex

aka being 'on time'

I had to look back at the menu to remind myself what I was eating. Roasted celery root and goat cheese puree with braised beets and black onions. The bite in my mouth practically exploded with flavor. It was so creamy and savory, the perfect complement to the sliced hanger steak resting on top (cooked medium-rare of course). Fortunately I got a bit of everything on my fork for that first bite. Put simply, it was incredible.

Looking around the table I could tell that my friends’ meals were equally outstanding. There was nodding and happy faces. A comfortable rhythm of eating and talking and drinking settled over us. I was officially 33.

The entire day leading up to dinner was just as fantastic, albeit tonally different. I was in pajamas until about 4 p.m. I wrote a lot. I sat in quiet. I texted with friends and talked on the phone. An entire pot of coffee was involved as well as leftover cake my coworkers got me the night before. The whole day was evenly split between monastic solitude and extroverted indulgence. I couldn’t have designed a birthday more tailored to my personality.

Birthdays can be a mixed bag, especially in our culture. It’s a time for celebration and merriment. It’s a time to let love slap you over the face and put a glittery wrapped present in your hands. It’s a time for friends and family to gather around and literally sing a song at you. It’s a time to acknowledge that you’ve “made it” another 365 days.

It’s arbitrary and silly, yet not. On one hand, we don’t do anything special to merit a birthday. All that happened was a person existed long enough to experience another full revolution around the sun. Accumulate enough days, get a treat. It’s inherently meaningless. And yet, surviving the human experience, which can be grueling, another 365 days is worthy of celebration. There were a lot of people who didn’t get a birthday this year. Making it to the next trail marker warrants a pause, an acknowledgment. You didn’t do anything and yet you kinda did.

Birthdays as we know them in our culture are a relatively new phenomenon. For huge swaths of human history, no one knew their birthday - at least not specifically enough to pinpoint an exact day. As our concept of calendars grew more sophisticated some people got a nod for the day they were born - the pharaohs and emperors and kingly types. No one else was important enough for that kind of recognition.

Within the last few centuries, with the advent of modern industrialization, that calendar became ever more granular and exact. Everyone got a birthday nod. Only now train schedules, hours worked, and factory timetables eclipsed planting periods, daylight hours, and harvest seasons. Nature’s schedule was no longer good enough. Clocks came into their superpower - ruling over productivity and economics. Our brains quickly rewired themselves to see time differently. As capitalism and consumerism merged, we became obsessed with this new construct of time. All things could now be divided into 3 categories - ahead of schedule, on time, or behind schedule.

And darn it if we didn’t somehow take our round, gelatinous, juicy, full lives and try to fit them into this new square hole. Everything, including human lives, must somehow fit into those 3 rigid categories - early, on time, or late. Our lives got standardized in order to move down the assembly line with minimal fuss. Birthdays are often a reminder of how on time we are or aren’t (mostly aren’t).

Did you play your cards right with your career? Can you retire early because of your good choices? How’s the hunt for that perfect forever life partner? Did you get the dream house while interest rates were good? What about those 2.5 kids? Ticktock you’re not getting any younger. Did you travel the world while you were free and unburdened? But what about building something meaningful by the time you’re 30? Did you relish your collagen like you were supposed to? Have you created your best work yet? Have you written that book? Or made your movie? Or recorded that album? You know time is running out.

Birthdays, and the numbers they represent, track our progress down the assembly line. But here’s the thing - it’s all made up. The whole thing was created by human hands. It’s not natural or innate. It’s not woven into our DNA. We’re not meant to be on a timeline. We’re, in fact, meant to find ourselves sitting at various points on a circle at various times. Those planting seasons and daylight hours always return to where they started. That’s the beauty of this existence, the one that’s occasionally grueling. Each day, each month, each year, is a return to the start. Trying to straighten that circle out into a line is the same as twisting our nature into something it is not.

So as I savored that hanger steak with celery root puree, I took a deep breath and looked around at the dreamy scene before me. A group of beautiful friends who love me, surrounded by good food and good wine, in a city I love with my family nearby and a roof over my head. If this is all that 33 holds for me, then shall and will be happy. And with any luck, I’ll be able to look up and see a similar scene before me year after year and know that I am exactly where I’m supposed to be.

Precisely on time.