The Arbitrary Nature of Birthdays

For the most part, birthdays are not that arbitrary because we're simply counting how many of the earth's revolutions around the sun a person has witnessed. And that's pretty cool, I guess.

But it gets even cooler when you think about this:

I was born on December 10, 1987, between 1 and 2 in the morning. In Germany. What does that mean? Well, since I live in America now, by American time, I was born December 9th, Because when I was born, it was in fact December 9th in America, about 5 or 6 in the evening.

Legally my birthday will always be December 10th, but technically, at 5 or 6 tonight, I will have witnessed 23 revolutions.

And what does this have to do with anything important? Well, the point is that things that are arbitrary are always vulnerable to change, or at least to be thought of in a changed way (which is the basis of real change, anyway).

And there are some big things that are arbitrary - and by arbitrary, I mean something that the human collective defined or gave value to. The biggest one is language, which is significant because it is through language that we make sense of the world. Through language we've created culture, ideologies, societal norms, and religion. Which also means that all of those things are vulnerable to change. Which, in some cases, could be a very good thing, if (and that's a HUGE if), if people began to think of all of those things as unstable, i.e. not truths that we cannot escape.

And I'll stop there before I get any further into what's called deconstruction theory, one of the leaders of which was French philosopher Jacques Derrida. But if you have some time on your hands (who has that?), and you want to spin your mind for a bit (who doesn't?), check it out: Derrida and Deconstruction.