Landmarks. How we are slaves to you. The more you mock us, the more we embrace you. No sooner is one celebrated than another emerges from over the horizon. What blissful lives women, and particularly men, must have lived before the invention of the calendar.
Some events, like birthdays and anniversaries, are mostly joyful. Others, like death, are not. Many are marketing exercises like Valentine's Day and Halloween.
And all are savage reminders of one thing: our impending, inescapable mortality. Yet we celebrate them with abandon nonetheless.
But rarely could a celebration have been as misguided and ill informed as the one that heralded the arrival of the planet's 7 billionth baby on Sunday, a meaningless - and arguably wrong - landmark despite its obvious symbolic nature.
In a crowded public hospital in Manila, Danica May Camacho became the world's symbolic 7 billionth person. The UN even presented the lucky winner with a chocolate cake and shoe vouchers, although rumours that she got stroppy because she did not get an iPhone remain unconfirmed. Photos were taken and speeches were made.
But as with all big celebrations, it's the ensuing mess that needs dealing with.
While the landmark undoubtedly has massive significance, it was certainly not one to be celebrated. But like the band playing as the Titanic slowly sank, the world's media wallowed in humanity's latest questionable achievement.
Newspapers, including this one, splashed the story across their front pages. Websites set up engines that could determine your order on mankind's conveyor belt (around the 3.5 billion mark for me, although I don't recall a UN delegation greeting my arrival.)
Adding to the farcical nature of the whole affair, there was even disagreement on which baby won the honour. One NGO went so far as to choose a different baby altogether. Poor demographic counts across the world's developing areas mean that the actual 7 billionth human could have been born months ago or may yet arrive sometime in the middle of 2012.
In truth, while many inexplicably raised a glass to the birth of number 7,000,000,000, the Earth's underlying issues, some would say catastrophes, have not gone unnoticed. The UN had designated October 31 as Seven Billion Day (which, fortunately, was not vetoed by the US) to raise awareness of the concerns that the planet faces now that Danica has joined us. Yet another anniversary that allows us to ignore the issues for the rest of the year.
The numbers are scary and by now familiar, but still bear repeating. The world's population has doubled from 1969 and a billion have been added since 1999. In 2082, a baby somewhere in Asia will celebrate being the 10 billionth on the planet with the obligatory chocolate cake. That is of course if cocoa trees, or the UN for that matter, have not died out by then.
Socially, the population explosion and longer life expectancy mean the old are getting older, with fewer and fewer people looking after them. The young have fewer and fewer jobs to go around. Issues like reproductive health, women's rights and inequality remain pressing. And that's before you even get to the global financial crisis, food scarcity, global warming and the Kardashians.
Should the Chinese decide to have more cars and McDonald's outlets, then it could well be bye-bye to our beloved rock as we know it.
"We should really focus on the question of whether there will be food, clean water, shelter, education and a decent life for every child," Dr Eric Tayag of the Philippines' Department of Health said shortly after baby Danica's birth . "If the answer is 'no', it would be better for people to look at easing this population explosion."
Never a truer word spoken. But then again, we will have far less to celebrate then Dr Tayag.
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