Short Essay About Birthdays Felix Berenskötter March 2023 Do birthdays matter? The intuitive answer is yes, they do. A birthday reminds us of the inaugural moment of entering the world and of growing up/older. It is an occasion to mark this process by adding another year and, occasionally, pass certain (shared) milestones in our life journey. As such, birthdays are moments of recognition of the Self as a temporal being and seem important events in our calendar year worthy of celebration. They have an existential dimension. But in what sense, exactly? Here, it might be fruitful to glean an answer from one of the key thinker of existentialist phenomenology, Martin Heidegger. That is not straightforward because, as far as I am aware, Heidegger never explicitly discussed whether and how to value the day of our birth. However, he offers a philosophical terrain within and against which this question can be explored. In his influential treatise Being and Time, Heidegger grapples with the meaning of being by focusing on the temporality of life and the fact that the existence of every human unfolds from birth to death (Heidegger 1953). For Heidegger, our unfolding is not meaningfully measured by counting how many years we spent on this planet. Like Henri Bergson (Massey 2014) before him, he rejects the notion of scientific time, a representation of the flow of time as a neat succession of quantitatively measurable units that can be objectively grasped by instruments such as the clock or the calendar. From this perspective, a date on the calendar that is presented as the same day and month, year on year, has no meaningful relevance for our being in time. Instead, this understanding is generated through experiences, which are gradually built up as we discover and disclose the world and ourselves within it. In Heidegger’s logic, an experience that enables us to grasp our temporality in full and provides a sense of ‘authentic’ being must bring us to face to face with the possibility of our own death. The event [Ereignis] plays an important role in this regard. From a Heideggerian perspective, the event is a profound intellectual and practical experience that pulls Dasein out of the comfort of the everyday and provides a primordial moment clarity of being in time (Heidegger 2013). Crudely put, I see two readings of how an event enables this: One version that leans