One day, the cultural boundaries of
social media will no doubt predictably expand to allow us, one and all, to meet
the communal expectation of sharing in real time-live action video what were at
one time in our anthropology human life’s most intimate routines. Like consuming our food over the sink or at
the kitchen counter, or perhaps our time in the rest room. While limited, obviously
and agreeably to head shots, depicting nothing too visibly obscene or graphic,
much as some modern prophets once presaged, for those inclined, our most
intimate lives are going to become some kind of inside-out Maysles Brothers-Fredrick
Wiseman-reminiscent documentary, composed of some lesser-cultivated mounds of self-cinematographuzed
surveillance footage. The more pretentious among us will opt for black-&-white.
Like any cultural norm on the
horizon, its advent exists in pronounced traces. The earliest trace will be
inarguably defined in social media’s initial effects upon the communal celebration
of birthdays in the common Judeo-Christian culture.
To the day this passage was written,
social media has, amidst the scorn and reprimand, been lauded as the extended
family conduit, allowing the detached and lonely among us to more easily share
and cultivate couches of friends and loved ones, with whom we can express our
most immediate thoughts and feelings, and hence never be alone.
Intimate relationships of any sort
work both ways. Those whose lives rebuild upon the welcome change of such constant
personal connection are forced to become re-socialized to accept the
responsibility of both acknowledging and receiving perfunctory greetings upon
one’s most ambivalently held personal dates. The most common of these would be
birthdays.
What makes the treatment of birthdays
on social media such a precarious matter is that while on-line virtual
communication is so rife with capability for video linking, picture-sharing,
creative graphics and the like, there exists among our electronically cyber-social
population, a vast amount of gregarious Facebook participants over the age of
twenty, who hold their birthdays, for better or worse, as a mostly
non-celebratory event. In kind, to those adults they know and hold dear, they may
see fit also not to openly laud any grand well-wishes, but rather keep their knowledge
of their friends’ awareness of their acknowledgment silently tacit, and greatly
respected.
To many, it isn’t really about an
abject “fear” of aging, or even some excruciating discomfort. But maturity installs certain mental
structures within the level-headed citizen.
As a boy of fourteen, I thought nothing was more outrageously hilarious than
the shock humor of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and their jokes and bits
referencing death, gags that played on their old BBC programme to howling
studio audiences. Many of the
humor-loving grownups around me at the time though, people generally of my
current age, didn’t find those death gags so funny. As a kid interested in
humor-writing, I couldn’t really understand why, though I knew there had to be
a reason. One time, with my most liberally-outspoken middle-aged aunt, one who
really did appreciate the bluer side of that Brit TV humor, I shared a common
Python death-joke reference, to which she sourly growled…..”Not funny….”
It would take me that golf-swing
distance from that moment in my teen life until now to understand why it wasn’t. It was essentially for the same reason that
obligatory birthday greetings for too many are not necessarily something arbitrarily
celebratory.
Okay, why..?! What’s with us Debbie-Downer-buzz
killers…?? Why can’t we just be happy in the face of the uproarious Facebook birthday
greeting avalanche and just dive in like a kid into a pile of shoveled fall
leaves, instead of moping around like a confused and alienated Dustin Hoffman
during his celebration party in The Graduate…?
My aunt didn’t like to think or even
joke lightly about death. Elders of mine who cut their comedy-loving teeth on
the likes of Sid Caeser, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks and Woody Allen, were the same
ultra-Jewish God fearers that knew the gothic and very direct dangers of that
thing dating all the way back to the ancient Greek societies: Hubris. I learned it to be that forbidden closet of
celebration and irreverence that directly provokes personal tragedy. For one
thing, you couldn’t write a play or a TV show without it.
Birthdays of course are not meant,
in our culture, to be directly associated with one’s passing. But as one veers through different time zones
in the human life personally for the first time, despite the blessed presence
of kindred souls, the internal response will always be one to negotiate. No time spent with any therapist,
psychiatrist or social counselor in some attempt at articulation may resolve it
either. And it just might not be
thoroughly conducive to a barrage of the most well-meant Facebook greetings,
memes, foolish aging jokes, cake illustrations, and what seem on many levels
like some obligatory ritual by every distant one of your mostly invisible 697
Facebook “friends” to post a “Happy Birthday”. Birthday night means a lot of acknowledging “like”
clicking before bedtime.
A friend of mine, a fellow I precede
by a decade or more, thanked his friends for all the social media greetings on
his birthday, which he cites as getting less celebratory as years move
forward. He’s a pretty upbeat and
successful guy to begin with, and my inner response to his comment was, “Y’know,
a birthday isn’t supposed to provoke a scratch-off winning ticket response. !” To yours truly, a birthday, for this grownup
anyway, is to be a day of utter and solemn joy.
No, it’s not a nine-year old’s anticipation of a Lego set, a new Bob
Dylan 8-track tape, and presents at a party later…It’s not some twenty-year old’s
keg party. For a mature grownup it’s a
precious, inarticulate day of appreciation and thanks for the care and safety
God has shown you, through the presence of others. It’s an annual time out for
some quiet self-observation, to get real about what you’re really letting
yourself get upset about unnecessarily, for some self-inflictive and pointless
reason, and appreciation of how much you’ve successfully overcome, a decorated
veteran of this thing called Life. Yours
need not be the book you will author, or the blog you’ll create, or story you’ll
cathartically share with others. But it’s
your honored badge nonetheless, to wear with pride.
It's a little hard sometimes to try
and maintain that austerity when you’re the birthday-greeting-recipient act on
this Facebook Gong Show. But that’s when
you realize. Off stage, when the set is shut down and the cheering studio audience
gone, you really are the recipient of that respect, the respect the virtual on-stage
celebrity panelists and their wild barbs know you share with them. They’ll know it even when the internet is
down worldwide, indefinitely. In the
interest of hubris, let’s not even discuss it any further.
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