Celebrate Your Billionth Second Birthday, Whatever Other Milestone You Want

Most people measure their birthdays in years while other (annoying) people talk about their half-birthdays and three month anniversaries. The annum gets drawn and quartered in an attempt to bleed out causes for celebration. It’s ridiculous and it’s unnecessary. Fortunately, we’ve now got Billionth Birthday, which urges people to celebrate their 11574th day of existence and puts the lie to the importance of the year.

Here is the case laid out by the tool’s developers:

As a number, 1 billion is an almost unimaginable. Here’s a way to help you imagine it. Use 1 billion—with its nine zeros—to measure your time. Look forward or back to your 1-billionth-second birthday. Mark it. Celebrate it. Then keep counting. Measure 1 billion with the seconds of your life.

Scientists from Galileo to Einstein have tossed around the concept that time is an illusion, and ideas like time dilation have long fascinated the mentally agile. But time is definitely real in the context of our every day lives, and it seems only fair that we get to celebrate whatever milestones we so choose. A billion seconds is a great place to start, but the endgame here is personalizing the birthday.

It’s time to start celebrating the passage of time on your own terms.