A lot of my friends are turning 40 this year, which means lots of parties and champagne. It also means lots of hard work, as members of the various birthday committees plan ahead for the day. But where once that work might have entailed sorting out venues and invite lists, it now requires that they solicit huge amounts of digital material – endless videos, selfies and photo montages – from the other guests to be compiled expertly into a package for the birthday girl or boy.
With each succeeding week comes another birthday, and with it another complicated request for two videos plus a comedy reworking of a popular song, plus photos in which everyone is asked to do something inventive with a prop and a more or less crazy costume. (Meanwhile, as the wedding season heats up, thousands of people slightly younger than me are in the early stages of learning their near-mandatory group dances for their friends’ receptions, to be captured on video and, God-willing, go viral.)
These are all lovely gestures, like elaborate and well-executed ad campaigns for the love one feels for one’s friends. And the time it takes to do them – although bordering on the insane – is better spent trying to take a video selfie while singing a line from a pop song to be edited into a Live Aid-style whole than staring slack-jawed and uncommunicative at one’s various social media feeds. (However, I have to say, every time I get asked to master a new application – “Can you just learn how to upload your video to Scatterbot and we’ll do the rest?” – my heart sinks).
To give an example: last year, one of the major birthday campaigns for a good friend required everyone on the guest list to submit to the planner two videos – one a talking head and one involving bits of paper to be held up in a comedy location – as well as a range of still photographs with captions. Because I’m in New York and the friend is in London, it seemed like a funny idea to shoot my video outside the United Nations building, resulting in some jerky and very un-festive footage of me running away from a security guard as he waved his arms and yelled “STOP FILMING!”.
These videos are the natural endpoint to these years of compulsive self-documentation: we are all now engaged in curating the material of our own and other’s lives into sophisticated packages as in some endless episode of America’s Got Talent, creating a sort of living obituary that is being constantly updated as we go along.
And these efforts, while intended to be celebratory, are so comprehensive as to have become rather maudlin, giving the recipient a real glimpse of what the funeral package will look like. All those skits, and speeches and 20 year old in-jokes gathered and edited to sum up a life can bring on a kind of panic if you’re not ready for it – a PBS special of your life, unspooling before your eyes.
And that’s without considering the man-hours that your friends have put into it. “Why don’t you go film yourself lying down in Times Square?” suggested a friend as I mulled over what to do for the latest video request. The birthday arms race that could probably do with undergoing a relaxation of standards at this point and a trimming of requirements from the increasingly long list.
I love my friends dearly, and it’s fun to celebrate them in inventive ways. But, as another birthday rolls round with a very long email detailing everything the guests need to do by next week, I have a tiny, sneaking desire to go old-school, sign a card and be done with it.