The Birthday Rule
I wanted to talk about something I’ve been mulling over in my head the bast couple months. It pops up everytime I’m on social media, specifically Facebook. THe idea is called the birthday rule.
The birthday rule is simple: If you see it’s someone’s birthday of Facebook and don’t care enough to even wish them a Happy Birthday through a 14 character message and a click you should simply unfriend them.
The motivation behind this is that social media can cause immense feelings of jealousy and insecurity. The simple way to view this is that if positive event X happened with friend Y, are you happy it happened for them? Or do you feel jealous? The link I’m making here (and by no means am I stating that it’s 100% valid link), is that their is a smaller tendency to get this feeling from genuine friends.
Another motivation behind this is Dunbar’s number. This theory is mentioned in Gladwell’s tipping point and states that the average person can only stably maintain 150 relationships. In person, this seems to make sense. How am I supposed to maintain genuine friendships with more than 150 people. That sounds exhausting. It feels that social media is not an exception the rule; rather than the natural decay in relationships that happens over time in the real world with emotional/physical distancing however, social media potentially force feeds consumers with an amount of information that exceeds the capacity they can handle stably.
Some people may say that social media is a tool to keep in touch with the people who have grown astray from us. If you’re using social media in this manner, than it would seem reasonable to have wide span of friends. However, the entity that social media has evolved into (for me at least) is that it is the primary manner through we which we communicate.
Thus, the birthday rule provides a simple solution to our limited capacity for genuine emotions. It’s a natural pruning method that can easily increase happiness. I would encourage anyone struggling with self-image to try it out. Focus on the people you genuinely care about.