If it’s your birthday, you should be the one giving people a birthday gift. Not the other way around.

You’ve been taking oxygen from the atmosphere for this many years?? What did you pay in return?

I got this realization while reading this blog post. I don’t think the author has intended to convey this idea, but he did.

Such a beautiful concept, no? How can I give back to the people around me that make my life worth living? A birthday becomes a milestone that pressures us to work harder to improve ourselves and provide value to those around us.

That sounds to me like a much better approach to birthdays than the conventional ‘make me feel special just because my parents chose to conceive me 9 months prior some year back’.

I realize that birthdays act like a little sweet treat for a lot of people in the middle of the bitterness of life, but like actual sugar, it’s probably better off if you cut it and develop an acquired taste for that bitterness 🙂