My friend Steve turned 30 on Monday, becoming the next in a long line of classmates crossing the great divide sometime this year. Born in November, I’m pretty much the last of us – it’s only taken thirteen-plus years for that late date of expulsion from a uterus to pay any kind of dividend. Yes, I get to stay 29 a little longer than everyone else. Revenge is mine! Take that, everyone else, for getting to drive nearly a full year before me! And for drinking in bars during junior year of college and all that summer and half that fall! It’s only when you realize that staying 29 is really nothing to brag about that my “reward” becomes less valuable than a Griswold Christmas bonus. None of my 30-year-old friends suddenly went gray or creaky, nor would I have wanted them to. But it’s yet another party for which I’m unfashionably late – and I promise you I wasn’t nearly this bitter until I read Outliers.

I still have half a year or more to prepare for my own graduation of sorts, but I am glad to see the commemorations that have taken place, and their scale. I love birthdays because they’re ultimately democratic: Everyone has a birthday, and only one. Rich folks can’t buy up more than their share, and even those with little else would seem have a day to feel special, even if only in their own eyes. And even if I can’t always attend them, I’m unequivocally a fan of birthday parties, not least of all my own. They’re social gatherings without an overarching agenda, not for ideas or principles, or for any number of granfalloons, for metaphysics, or to prolong our ongoing consumerist nightmare. They’re apolitical and aracial (?) and except for the obvious and often confirmable detail of the birthdate, almost arbitrary. I’d argue they’re downright whimsical – until they or you get old.

Nonetheless, parties for 30-year-olds hit a good cross-section of emotions, too: Usually folks are still young enough to want to go out, eat a lot, drink a little bit; nowadays at least in my circles there are few children involved to really complicate the proceedings, necessitating babysitters, and so on. But like a ten-year high school reunion, versus a twenty, they’re pretty much equally about looking back and looking forward.

On Sunday, I spent time with Steve and two other floormates from freshman year – odd how those ties bind – in what turned out to be a de facto birthday party, more a sendoff for his 20s. There was beer, which I’ll flesh out, and cigars and steaks – which I won’t. For as seldom as I see these guys (my own failing) who keep in better touch, I felt rejuvenated by the day, only mostly because of all the chemicals we took in. An easy, lazy Sunday was on that day a party in itself. And it was a chance to look back – an essential, comforting practice that I eventually realized, a solid 48 hours of restless sleep later, is probably better to do less often than more. Glorifying the past, excessively, only serves to make the future that much dimmer. Facing backwards in the back of a moving car is fun, when you’re a kid. Eventually you have a chance to get that driver’s license – sooner or later, maybe after all your friends – and with that agency you finally have to face forward, foot on the gas, eye in the rearview only for safety, and sparingly.