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Birthdays are supposed to be fun. You eat cake, you open presents, maybe you have a party. They can also, however, become a source of pressure and anxiety. And for many teens today, birthdays are a time when the public nature of social media and the private joys of friendship awkwardly collide.
Teens often post celebratory photos or messages on their Instagram stories for friends’ birthdays, Kashika, 19, told me a few weeks ago in a conversation about kids and friendship. Then the birthday kid will reshare those posts to their own account. The number of posts you share “forms an image of how many friends you might have,” Kashika explained.
Kashika, a contributor to the podcast This Teenage Life, remembered seeing classmates share tons of birthday stories, and thinking, “Oh my God, they’re so popular.” Then, on her birthday, not a single person posted a story for her. “I felt really bad,” she said.
The birthday post (or lack thereof) has become a common source of anxiety, according to experts who work with kids. Teens report “feeling a lot of pressure to post for people’s birthdays, to post in a certain way, to post efficiently, effusively,” Emily Weinstein, executive director of Harvard’s Center for Digital Thriving, told me. On the flip side, teenagers worry about having enough people post on their birthdays to “signal that you have people who really care about you” or to “show that you have a sufficient number of friends,” Weinstein said.
Birthday wishes are one way that teens feel pressure to “perform closeness” on social media, posting photos and messages of affection publicly “both as part of being a good friend and as a way of validating their own social acceptance and connectedness,” Weinstein and Carrie James wrote in their 2022 book, Behind Their Screens.
Performing closeness isn’t new — teens used to decorate one another’s lockers for birthdays, Devorah Heitner, author of the book Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World, told me (we did not do this at my school, and now I feel left out). But social media adds a new layer of labor to kids’ already fraught social lives, forcing them to make calculations about how to celebrate their friends online — and how to respond if their friends don’t do the same for them.
Birthdays on social media offer a whole buffet of new stressors, kids and experts told me. For one thing, posts are easier to quantify than locker decorations. “You can literally just count the likes or count the reposts,” Heitner said. “That’s very vivid.”
Even posting on other people’s birthdays can be nerve-wracking, kids say. “I used to post for every friend that I had,” Divya, 19, told me. But then she realized that other kids were only posting birthday stories for friends who had posted birthday stories for them. “It felt very weird,” Divya said, because she didn’t personally care if someone had posted a birthday message for her or not.
There’s also pressure to make your birthday post reflect the level of your friendship. “If someone is your best friend, you have to make it extra special,” Divya, a This Teenage Life contributor, told me. “You have to just do it for the sake of making your friends feel special on social media.”
That pressure to craft the perfect birthday post that communicates the specialness of a friendship is part of a larger pattern, experts say. On the one hand, “social media offer compelling opportunities to validate relationships and show public support for others,” Weinstein and James write. On the other, “when so much of posting is an expectation and over-the-top compliments are the norm, being authentic can feel nearly impossible and knowing what’s authentic can be like reading tea leaves.”
The pressure to perform closeness can be exhausting and annoying, kids say. One 17-year-old, Michelle, told Weinstein and James that she’d recently gotten stressed because she liked a friend’s photo but couldn’t think of a comment right away. “I get really nervous about it too, because I have to think of something quick, and it has to be something really good,” she said. Once she’d engaged by liking the post, the clock was suddenly ticking. “There’s definitely expectations to comment on a post.”
Especially among younger teen girls, “there’s a feeling that if we are close, people should know we’re close,” Weinstein said. If they’re not representing their friendship online through likes, comments, and posts, some teens feel “they’re not somehow not doing justice to the relationship.”
As Kashika put it, Instagram stories and other social media posts become “like a declaration in society that this person is my friend.”
Pushing back on the pressure
Performing closeness is far from unique to teenagers — adults are doing the same thing when they post cute photos and adoring captions on their anniversaries, Heitner said. And getting fewer birthday posts than you’d like, or fewer than other people get, can feel lousy whether you’re celebrating your 14th birthday or your fortieth. After all, millennials on Facebook arguably invented birthday posting culture (and stressful birthday comparisons along with it).
But for teenagers, whose needs for social approval and inclusion are so high, an underwhelming birthday on Instagram can be especially hard, Heitner said.
Luckily, teens are developing some of their own ways of coping with the pressure social media puts on their friendships. Some are just using Instagram less in general, Heitner said. “It is socially acceptable now to be a kid who’s like, ‘I don’t really like this. I barely check it.’”
Others are learning to draw a distinction between performed closeness and the real thing. Kashika felt bad “for a while” when no one posted on her birthday, she told me. But “then I thought, no, this is just part of social media,” she said. “It does not actually depict our real friendship. And then my mood got a little better.”
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