Birthday Wishes in 2025 - Are These Little Rituals Really So Trivial?
1. Online Identity
We live in an age of endless account registration. Almost every tool we use on our phones or computers for work and life requires an account before it becomes useful. I do not know whether anyone has ever tried spending a full day in modern society without using any tool that requires login, but I imagine that would be quite difficult.
In essence, every person has an online identity, and most tools do not allow unidentified users to participate.
But that also creates a whole series of problems. Your online identity does not truly belong to you. It can be lost, forgotten, or even taken away.
Most internet services require registration with a mobile phone number or an email address. Neither one truly belongs to the user. A phone number belongs to a telecom operator; an email address depends on the mail provider and domain provider. If they reclaim your number, email, or domain, your online identity is suddenly in trouble. If you cannot change it in time, you may lose it altogether. Not long ago I got a data SIM card from China Unicom and kept receiving messages meant for the previous owner, many of them debt-collection texts. They did not affect my normal use, but the whole thing still felt absurd. These days, changing your phone number is a serious hassle, and it is almost impossible to know how many online identities are tied to it.
Not only does the account name not belong to you, but the legal ownership of the account does not belong to you either. Take WeChat as an example: the ownership of a WeChat account belongs to Tencent. Clause 7.1.2 of the WeChat Service Agreement explicitly states that users obtain only the right to use the account after registration. Broadly speaking, accounts across online services belong to the service providers, while users only have the right to use them. So providers can suspend or cancel your account unilaterally at any time, and that is entirely legal. A few years ago, when Trump was banned from Twitter, that was exactly this kind of situation.
2. Birthday Wishes
Back to the main topic: once you register, personal information naturally follows, and entering a birthday is hard to avoid. Many people probably just fill in something random. I once read that New Year's Day is the most common birthday in online data, and of course that is because it is often the default choice during registration.
My own habit is to leave my real birthday in serious settings. In less important places, since I am getting older, I would rather seem a little younger.
Once a birthday exists, birthday wishes follow. They usually fall into a few categories.
Pure text-message greetings. Banks, brokerages, and insurance companies used to love this. Years ago people joked that banks were the earliest to wish you happy birthday, sometimes even before midnight, earlier than family and friends. This year there were far fewer of those, and many turned into a background image or banner inside an app. There are exceptions, of course: ABC sent me a birthday text at the beginning of the month inviting me to spend one cent on a prize draw. Yes, the point was simply to make me generate another transaction.
Big internet companies tend to use in-app greeting cards. Alipay and QQ are typical examples. You open the app and see a full-screen image decorated with lines like how many days they have accompanied you. That still carries a bit of emotional value.
Companies that actually give you a small practical gift. That deserves real credit. JD gave me 500 JD Beans, basically a five-yuan voucher, plus some discount coupons. China Telecom gave me 20 GB of data. China Unicom gave me 300 points. Meituan and Ctrip gave me little red packets.
What disappointed me most were Taobao, Didi, and Ele.me. For tools so directly tied to spending, they did not say a single word. WeChat and Douyin also had no gesture at all.
In the age of big data, it is impossible that you do not know my birthday. You simply choose not to do anything about it.