In the grand cosmic scale, the day you’re born isn’t special. In fact, it’s pretty insignificant.
If the entire age of the known universe was condensed into a standard Gregorian calendar (the calendar that we generally use today), just one second of this condensed cosmic year would hold approximately 438 real years within it.
So, everyone you’ve ever known and met, everyone you’ve loved, hated, admired, and looked up to, and everyone you’ll meet in the near future, has lived and died much within this very second of the cosmos.
All of humanity’s recorded history took place within the last cosmic minute. Modern humans arrived just a few cosmic minutes ago.
We’ve done pretty well for ourselves in just a few cosmic seconds. We’ve also done some horrible things (and still continue to do so) in the same time period.
How will the next few cosmic seconds, or even the very next cosmic second, shape up to be? I wonder.
Compared to all that has happened over the last 13.8 billion years, my or your individual existence is obviously insignificant, let alone our birthdays. Though I must add, collectively, the human race does add up to something symbolic.
Now that the insignificance of our birthdays has been established, I think celebrating them does elicit some valid reason. It has more do with us and how we live our lives than the cosmos itself, of which we’re also a part of.
We love recognizing patterns. A year is nothing but the time the Earth takes to finish a single revolution around the Sun. Combine that with our self-centered nature, celebrating our respective birthdays does make some sense; somewhat.
With so much randomness in the Universe, celebrating your birthday is nothing but recognizing your lucky moment of birth within this cosmic second. In that sense, I think it’s justified.
P.S. Inspired by Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar.
