So let me get this straight - the purpose of the birthday ritual is to make everyone identify as being of certain age and act in ways that society has determined acceptable?

What about the thousands years of history and non-western cultures where people didn't celebrate birthdays and yet were supposed to act their age? What if aging and maturity is not just numbers you identify with but a natural process that reflects the objective reality of our human nature? Nah, they just want to limit you and make you fit their socially constructed mould, man. Not being a permanent adolescent means you've been programmed.

This dude took a couple of shrooms and thought he figured it all out. This is what the majority of conspiratards are like. "They want to control you, man. It's all fake." (meanwhile the guy goes to SRI/Tavistock ran new age festivals like Burning Man where he takes MK-Ultra mind-altering substances that destroy his identity and reasoning faculty but thinks he escaped the matrix...)

My take is that birthdays have been so heavily emphasized in our society because they promote individualism, consumerism and self-worship feeding into vices like vanity, greed and pride ("It's all about me - this is the biggest celebration of all. Today I am God, but tomorrow it's your turn"). But that's too reasonable an explanation for the guy with the threads.

PS: I'm a music major, and there's no such a thing as a "slightly minor key". Happy birthday is in a major key consisting solely of the tonic, subdominant and dominant major chords.