My birthday came up a week ago. More correctly it was the anniversary of the day I was born but nobody uses that many syllables. This was the 74th time I have lived through the same month and day which is a useful way to account for just how old I have become.
In addition to merely counting years passing by other metrics can be helpful in assessing the effective aging of a person in our culture: Does he have all his original parts? How restricted have his activities become? Is his medical provider bored when he arrives for an examination? Has the dollar value of his expenditures shifted away from hedonism toward survival?
For me the answers are "yes", "about 15%" (depending on the details of the metric), "usually" (unless my humorist persona is at the fore), and "not by more than the systemic error of the measurment".
This year three other questions presented themselves. Or seemed to. My belief is that thoughts are driven by minds even when the mind is subsequently driven by the thought -- but ignore that for the moment and enjoy the consciousness of these questions.
Q: How am I like a bridge?
A: Both the infrastructure and I are aging but neither is likely to fall down today.
Q: How am I better than Amazon?
A: Amazon's Prime but I am twice prime.
Q: What is the first thing I wondered about my birthday?
A: What is the prime factorization of my new age?
Next year, I thought, the prime factorization will be more varied than this year. On reflection I realized that is not objectively the case. Next year's factorization will again involve only two primes both different from this year's. One of next year's primes will appear twice and thus next year's factors will be smaller, on average, than this year's. Next year's factoriztion will be more interesting if you are intrigued by how very small numbers can so easily generate much larger numbers but less interesting if you particularly enjoy primes larger than the dactyl integers (by which I mean the ones you can count on your fingers: 1 to 10 for most of us).
In actual reality my penchant for being swept up in such primal ponderings probably tells you more about who I am and how I am functioning than the count of years or the boredom of my physician.