Why don’t I celebrate birthdays and what do I do on that day

Birthdays fuel the time tunnel

A.Philosopher
One Theory About Everything
2 min readSep 20, 2022

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I don’t like celebrating my birthday. It’s something I haven’t done in the usual way for a long time. The common celebrations: family, gatherings with friends, parties, gifts. You are the center of attention that day.

The truth is that I don’t like to celebrate it for two philosophical reasons. It’s not rational, but maybe it is.

The first reason is that it feeds the ego, the feeling that I am the center of everything that day.

The point is that you have that pleasant feeling of being in the spotlight, but you haven’t really done anything to deserve it. Once a year they give you attention, and the rest of the days they don’t.

You teach the brain and its neural structures the pleasure of attention for nothing. It’s basically fame for a day. Not only that, but you also receive gifts for no real reason.

Once a year is not bad, you may think. Nothing happens. But you learn to feel good in the spotlight by doing nothing. Yeah, I’m pretty Stoic in that regard.

The second reason, perhaps more important.

Celebrating birthdays, and counting the years, gives you the feeling that your life is rectilinear. But, that is not real. That line that not exist, it is just a mental construction that we maintain by being always present.

We remember events from the past connected to our age structure. Which is not real.

The only thing that really exists is the present.

I prefer to remember everything as if it were yesterday, and not link the events of my life to a non-existent line.

Instead of remembering all the events one after the other in a linear system, I use a giant imaginary cabinet with a drawer for each day. This cabinet allows me to access and remember what happened each day.

The advantage is that you remember everything much more vividly. You remember the events as if they were yesterday.

My event storage system is totally different.

There are no years in my mental imaginary, so I don’t have to count them or celebrate them.

As the years do not pass, you do not age either. The body obviously ages, but you don’t.

You remain infinite and eternal.

Something I do that day. I use it to feel one with the universe, meditate and contemplate. I am thankful that I am living. And yes, I like to spend that day alone, in tune with the universe.

Test it once, if you don't celebrate, feel like that year didn’t happen. You trick your brain and time doesn’t pass.

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A.Philosopher
One Theory About Everything

Philosopher, artist, writer, lover. Author of: One Theory of Everything