Do Me A Favour And Stop Sending “Happy Birthday!” Texts In The Group Chat

The past might be a foreign country but if you’re an older millennial with a Yahoo email address and a drawer full of trainer socks, the present is no less baffling. Why are grown men trading punches over plushies? What in the name of god is the poop rule? Who’s eating all the cottage cheese? Bewildering trends like these are hardly a modern phenomenon, I know, but in the age of TikTok they spread from one side of the world to the other before you can say “Dubai chocolate”. Consequently for those of us who dip in and out of social media instead of maintaining a constant online presence, logging into Instagram on a Sunday night can feel like climbing the Magic Faraway Tree and finding yourself in a strange new land.

Still, crazes come and go and for the most part provoke nothing more than a chuckle or a raised eyebrow. So what if we lose the run of ourselves every now and then? Ultimately the clamour subsides, the dust settles and society rights itself again. Events rarely spin completely out of control because the majority of people, I like to think, know how to behave — online and off.

And then a friend drops a message in the group chat.

“Happy Birthday Tash!”

It is 7.01 a.m. and you are still in bed, rubbing sleep from your eyes. Within minutes, texts begin to arrive from the other members of the group. You can tell who’s made an effort to personalise their message — or, perhaps, who is in a rush — by the presence of an extra exclamation mark here or an abbreviation there.

“Happy Birthday Tash!!!”

“Have a great day T x”

“HBD Tash!”

The birthday girl, hopefully having a lie-in, is silent and now you are feeling the pressure to add a greeting to the chorus. The fact that there is a thoughtfully chosen card for Tash propped up on your dresser, to be handed over when you meet her later for a celebratory drink, is neither here nor there. Failure to participate in the birthday pile-on will be noted not just by Tash but by everyone else in the group. Dutifully you tap out a message and head for the bathroom to brush your teeth.

Friends coming together to wish another friend happy birthday. Harmless enough, right? Wrong. If you ask me, the person who sends that initial message is committing an egregious act of friendship hit-and-run. Think about it. DM a friend on their birthday and chances are you’ll have to send at least one follow-up text when they inevitably ask how you are and what you’ve been up to. Share your well wishes in the group chat, however, and you sidestep the time-consuming business of engaging in further conversation — a particularly effective strategy if the friend in question is second-tier rather than BFF.

Perhaps this is the cynic in me talking but I suspect, too, that the motivating factor for sharing birthday greetings in the group chat is less a desire to make your loved one feel special on their special day and more a compulsion to show off. There is a performative function to dropping a “Happy Birthday!” text in a space where it can be seen by people other than the intended recipient. The fact that it unleashes, almost invariably, a flood of messages from other members of the group is confirmation for the original texter that they are somehow superior. That they have won the friendship race. (I’m not extrapolating here; check out these posts where proponents of such heinous behaviour confess to relishing this very feeling.) It’s the group chat equivalent of the juvenile mentality that was common in the early days of YouTube, when people — probably men, let’s be honest — would scramble to be the first to comment on a clip, posting simply and quite pointlessly, “first”. 

And what about the poor individual on the receiving end of this barrage of texts? Imagine waking up on your birthday, reaching for your phone and opening the group chat to find a stream of greetings all sent within minutes of each other. To my mind these aren’t “Happy Birthday!” messages. These are “Gina’s wished you Happy Birthday so now I’m wishing you Happy Birthday!” messages. Or “Oh shit I forgot it was your birthday, good job Ellie reminded me. Happy Birthday!” messages. The overarching sentiment is not warm and heartfelt but guilt-stricken and insincere. For she’s a jolly good fellow? Don’t make me laugh. 

If you are lucky enough — or, depending on your perspective, unfortunate enough — to be part of a family group chat, there is a fun twist on this trend which involves adults who really should know better filming their kids singing “Happy Birthday” to nan or grandad or whoever and dropping the video in the chat. We know what you’re doing, guys. Send the video directly to the recipient and pass up the opportunity to have the entire family coo over your little one’s adorable lisp and idiosyncratic dance moves? Please. The trouble with this is that it creates a kind of one-upmanship, with each subsequent birthday kicking off a procession of pageant-like home movies in which grown-up siblings vie to outdo one another via the medium of their children’s cuteness. I have a kid myself so I understand the drive to show them off but in doing so the person whose birthday it is — the reason for all this silliness, remember — gets forgotten altogether.

Am I being overly sensitive? I don’t think so. There is a difference, for my money, between platforms like TikTok and Instagram, which invite and thrive on performativity, and messaging services like WhatsApp that facilitate communication on a private, more personal level (unless you are in government, of course). It is an unfortunate fact that the group chat brings out our more irritating human tendencies but perhaps that is unavoidable — a reflection of how a group of adults would interact in the real world. What makes me sad is seeing performative behaviour of the kind that we have come to expect elsewhere on social media invade these more intimate spaces. So let’s commit to stop sending “Happy Birthday!” texts in the group chat. The only person who needs to see those words is the one who’s celebrating.