Back in the pre-Facebook era, birthday greetings are the sweet reminders that demarcate the special friends from the ordinary acquaintances. We used to receive birthday greetings only from the most special people - family, lovers, and really close friends... I remember waiting for the clock to strike 12 midnight to wait for the first of the many messages that would come pouring in. During our special days, we like to glance at our phones, put it down, pick it up again after ten seconds, and see whether there's a new set of "x messages received" displayed on the screen. Whenever a message comes in, our hearts beat to the ecstatic vibrations of the phone. Every "1 message received" is a gift wrapper that we excitedly open in anticipation of a heartfelt message. The birthday greetings are especially touching because we know that these people deliberately wrote down our birth dates on their phone calendars and organizers. They went out of their way to text us a simple reminder that we mean something to them by greeting us a Happy Birthday.
Ever since the advent of Facebook, these sentimental traditions are gradually being forgotten. During our birthdays, we see every Tom, Dick, Harry, Juan, Tomas, and Maria writing superfluously courteous "Happy birthday!:)" posts on our walls. Certainly, there's a tickly pleasure to respond to the posts one by one, as a way of catching up with acquaintances, but it becomes tiring the moment you realize that the person you're replying to most probably wouldn't have greeted you in real life. It becomes especially bothersome and awkward when we receive greetings from total strangers. Sure, there's a whole lot of excitement with the overwhelming number of people who greet us. But bear in mind that many of them did not remember your birthday. They just saw a notification beside their homepage, want to feel good about themselves, and so head to your wall to greet you. Heck, I know this procedure by heart because this is mostly what I do too. Sometimes I don't even feel like greeting the person, but it just bothers my conscience to ignore a birthday notification since Facebook just makes it so easy to greet someone. In the end, even the 'special' people just greet us on Facebook because it's too damn easy to do so. The consequence of this is that we have no way of knowing who really remembered our birthdays anymore. Facebook has made the genuine birthday greeting a dying breed.
In the end, birthday greetings are still birthday greetings. Our hearts simply can't help but flutter at the sight of them. But it's just sad how Facebook notifications have robbed an entire generation of the sweet obligation of remembering birthdays. Greetings have become reduced to cheap, manufactured, and spoonfed babblings of near insignificance. It is indeed downright tragic that a supposedly 'social' network just inadvertently killed the whole notion of a heartfelt birthday greeting.
P.S. It's not my birthday, nor is the date near. I just wrote this to share an observation ;)
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