I'm getting sick of pretending to be excited every time it's somebody's birthday. What is the big deal? How many times do we have to celebrate that someone was born? Every year, over and over. All you did was not die for twelve months. That's all you've done, as far as I can tell.

In Seinfeld’s characteristic observational-comedy mode, the speaker punctures the social script around birthdays by reframing them as a low bar: mere survival. The humor comes from deflating a culturally “sacred” ritual into blunt, almost bureaucratic accounting—twelve months elapsed, person not dead—thereby exposing how much celebration depends on convention rather than achievement. Beneath the joke is a mild critique of compulsory enthusiasm and performative politeness: the irritation is less at birthdays themselves than at the expectation that everyone must repeatedly enact excitement on cue. The line also plays with existential irony, suggesting that what we honor annually is time’s passage and our vulnerability, not a personal accomplishment.