Breaking Down Every ‘Happy Birthday’ Facebook Post

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Due to obligatory revelation with every user’s overly personal information, monitoring people’s birthday wishes every year on their Facebook walls has quietly become one of the most revealing currencies of social capital (for better or worse). Gone are the days of sending your friends birthday cards, taking them out to dinner, or even giving them a simple phone call to catch up and joyfully talk about nothing for a few minutes; in are the days of spending two seconds on your Facebook app to acknowledge some distant connection’s anniversary of their existence on earth.

There are infinite ways to go about this passive-yet-telling annual social interaction. Here is the real story behind the most popular type of virtual well-wishes for the one and only day of the year where you’re entitled to feel important.

“Happy Birthday!!!”

By omitting the name altogether, this person is doing a bad job at pretending to care about you. There is a zero percent chance that this fake friend of yours could have actually told anyone your actual birthday, and only a 19% chance they could have even gotten the month right. If you don’t have human interaction with this person within the next 12 months, consider deleting them from your Facebook friends.

“Happy Birthday [Insert Name Here]!!!”

This person is seriously misinformed regarding punctuation in the English language. Since “Happy Birthday” has never been proper noun-worthy event for anyone ever, there are zero plausible instances in which the B should be capitalized. “Happy birthday (…)” will suffice, so please get off of your uppercase high horse, Facebook try-hards. The lack of comma further demonstrates their ignorance; without the comma, this person is giving off the impression that “Happy Birthday Dave” is a holiday and that the person is not being spoken to directly.

“HBD”

This person acknowledges that you all are friendly acquaintances but not on a consistent “Let’s hangout” basis. You may have become temporary bros over a mutual friend’s bachelor(ette) party weekend, and have thus gained mutual respect as responsible functioning citizens of society.

“hbd” or “happy birthday”

Couldn’t have said it any better:

Sarcastic “What’s up” kind of post

You and this person have a friendship that is way too “real” for the artificiality of social media, so this person wants to share that fact with the world by mocking everyone else’s lame posts. You get way more joy and laughter out of this facetious share than any article of clothing you don’t want that your mom gifts you on this day anyway.

Sentimental breakdown of friendship with some kind of throwback picture

This person undoubtedly plans on being in your wedding and has been on BFF-level status for at least two years. This person has had your birthday marked on their calendar for months, has been crafting together the perfectly sentimental post full of insightful allusions to your somewhat long connection that everyone else can only dream of being in on.

If you want your day to be ruined, go look at the steady decline in total quantity of total Facebook posts on your birthday each year — it’s almost foolproof. Let’s all hope that the quality of your friendships hasn’t declined with your growing age too..

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An enthusiastic kid at heart, I'm passionate about properly taking care of my hairline, having an inappropriate amount of DVR series recordings, and pretending to be a beer snob. Still on my quest to find my irresistible lifeguard dream girl who can rock the one-piece bathing suit. Hit me up on MySpace.