There’s a good reason I don’t like birthdays and no, it’s not what you’re thinking

June 1, 2026 — 7:30pm

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Don’t know about you but I have arrived at the quiet truth that most adults discover and never say out loud: birthdays, for a significant portion of the population, are not the dazzling celebration the world insists they should be.

Let me be clear about what this is not. It has nothing to do with getting older. No, really. I have long since made my peace with the accumulation of years. In fact, I’d argue that kind of anxiety is deeply overrated and largely a construct sold to us by the beauty industry. The number doesn’t bother me in the slightest. What bothers me is the expectation.

Somewhere along the way, birthdays stopped being a simple acknowledgment that you’d survived another trip around the sun and became a full-scale production.

A day that is supposed to arrive draped in flowers, gifts, champagne, cake and people who love you – a day that is supposed to feel different from every other day. And when it doesn’t – when it feels like a........

© The Sydney Morning Herald