Ask HN: How do you celebrate your birthday?

No such thing as 'wasting' life. It doesn't really matter what you do - the core moment-to-moment existence if the same for everyone, what differs is just what you sense moment-to-moment (touch, smell etc., but more importantly also mental impressions like emotional states and various other mental images like memories). In fact, all of existence has always been just here in this moment; this moment is all that has ever been and will ever be. So 'have been wasting most of my life' is just a mental construct, and not a very useful one at that.

-- my father refused to celebrate his - mine - or any other birthday for that matter - he used to say he was saving me from disappointment later down the road - that nobody will care or remember when I get old - he was mostly right --

I used not to care too much, but then life hammered home the lesson that it can be very short.

So now I look at it differently: birthday or christmas or other such days are an excuse to have some kind of gettogether. Take family, friends, someone you've not seen for a while, ... and go out, eat , ... The reason is not important, the activity is not important, but seeing each other again is.

This means my birthday is not about me, it's just an excuse. Nobody should waste money bringing presents or saying congratulations or whatever.

That's a pretty negative attitude to purposefully instill in your child. I pretty much agree with his view on birthdays, but pushing that view to a child is so wrong.

I had my birthday 2 days ago. I tried to keep it as lowkey as I could since I always feel strange when people say 'happy birthday'. For what? I agree with the comment that said take any excuse to celebrate things, but it's not like a contributed to something just by being born.

If anything birthdays should be a celebration of our mothers and family, not in the selfish way birthdays are usually constructed. I find it extremely odd when someone congratulates me awkwardly for being born, as some sort of social tax, and I find it even more depressing when more people compliment me seemingly more on my birthday than on meaningful achievements, which usually are swept with a rug with a 'nicely done'. So all in all I just try to skip the whole deal. There's just something not right at the center of it all.