The place where I work when it's someone's birthday, a mail is sent out to the entire team informing them that it's this particular individual's birthday.
Due to the nature of my childhood—the woe be unto me nature of which I won't get into—birthdays have never been a particularly joyous occasion for me.
They often remind me of large swaths of normalcy absent from my life. Due to this, my preferred way of dealing with my birthday has been to not be aware that is is my birthday.
This obviously isn't possible due to the deluge of reminders, the majority of which are automated, such as the earlier mentioned email.
Almost as soon as I became aware of this system, I set a reminder to go off one day before my birthday. This was to remind me to do something to prevent the email from being sent out.
When the reminder did its job, I went and changed my birthdate on my company profile page.
0000 rolled by and no email. Hell yeah, I thought, I've outsmarted the system, no one will ever come to know when I was born!
I was awake for quite a long time, until 0400, not due to celebrations (obviously), but because I was stuck on some stupid Webpack error and couldn't go to bed until I'd solved it.
When I woke, I was inundated with messages. My clever plan did not work out, how?! Turns out I had edited the incorrect record, and that the mail isn't sent to the person whose birthday it is.
This in retrospect seems obvious but given my lack of experience with birthdays, it wasn't very obvious to me.
What surprised me was the number of people that wished me. Historically the number of non-blood-related-humans that wish me has been fewer than the it takes to play the Smoke on the Water riff. This time though, number of people that wished me exceeded the digits on my hand.
And I don't mean the kinda wishing. I mean full-blown personal chat kinda wishing—absolutely unprecedented! Some of those who wished me, I had never even spoken to. This obviously made me think, as to why they would do such a thing.
Keep in mind that I'm not some rockstar 10x dev in the company. I'm a fringe character who mostly elides himself from the company affairs, but rears his head once in a blue moon to assure those concerned that he's been diligent.
So, this completely rules out . Maybe they felt obligated to wish me due to the company's social structure? It surely can't be 100% Jesus Christ certified goodwill, right?
The only way of testing this would be if everyone got a reminder email while thinking that they are the only ones receiving the email. Obviously, the group, where wishes are sent out like a UDP datagram (you either get it or you don't), would have to be eliminated to prevent cross talk.
And this experiment would have to be repeated multiple times, each with a different birthday person. This would beget a reasonably accurate goodwill metric.
But since this silly experiment is equal parts unethical and unrealistic, one has to resort to heuristics. And so, I finally decided that people are nice.
I appreciate such moments because they remind me that I don't need to use the colors of my sub-optimal past to paint my future.
In a way, I'm glad that I messed up my misanthropic masterstroke. The alleviation of asocial tendencies certainly doesn't arise from pushing people further away.
On the contrary, it probably requires being around emotionally stable, gregarious people.
This isn't a new realization, but it's nice to be reminded of it every once in a while. Acting in accordance with this realization is still incredibly difficult.
I have more than a decade of social unlearning to do.