Good news! Birthday wishes are finally meaningless. All the birthday cards you’ve ever posted, all the tender heartfelt messages sent to loved ones, all the dates seared into your memory through years of joy, are now utterly invalidated, so we should all stop bothering and move on with our lives.
If you’re wondering who to thank from freeing us of the burden of caring about arbitrary dates, it’s Facebook. Thanks to them, the phrase “Happy Birthday!” is now a hollow shell. Why? This:
Friend shared a text from @Facebook where to say "Happy Birthday!" You just reply "1" - which is nuts. pic.twitter.com/8FrIBufsrY
— Peter Knox (@peterknox) July 28, 2015
It gets worse: FB texts him with EVERY birthday, every day with this message...
— Peter Knox (@peterknox) July 28, 2015
The feature is part of Facebook’s SMS notification functionality, which lets users interact with the site through text messages. By default, Facebook will text you if you get sent a message, if you receive a friend request, if someone comments on your status updates and timeline posts or for “everything else”.
That latter category has for a long time included birthday notifications, something which there are endless complaints about online, but over the last year, Facebook has been rolling out the insta-reply feature.
Our advice? If someone posts “Happy Birthday!” on your timeline with that exact capitalisation and punctuation, it’s probably best to unfriend them, block their numbers, and ignore them IRL. They never cared about you anyway.
