People who no longer feel interested in important days like your birthdays, Christmas, New year eve, etc... when did you feel that and why?

I grew up with a narcissist. For a lot of us raised by narcissists, that's enough explaination. For others, here's a couple examples:

Edit: This turned longer and more rant-y than I meant. Oh well.

My nFather wrecked all excitement I had for special occasions over the years. A few decades of hearing nothing but money complaints and having evenings purposefully ruined will do that to you. Also the forced march to return gifts that I've bought didn't help (using my allowance, thus his money and I didn't need to be wasting it on useless things like gifts).

Also several occurrences of crap like, "Who cares if I cut into your birthday cake hours before you were ready or knew you had a cake? The one we didn't think we could afford and your mother barely managed to scrounge together the money for. It's just us, it's not like you have anyone coming over." Paraphrased, but not that much.

Also if we weren't having a Norman Rockwell postcard worthy, perfect day? Then it's a huge waste of time and effort and you may as well have not bothered. And it's obviously not postcard worthy because you screwed something up. (And if the rest of the family tries catering to him and everything that can feasibly go right, does, then he will seek out and find a new reason why all your efforts were in fact shit and it was a terrible evening.)

I'm not bitter or anything. (: Mostly I don't feel strongly about holidays and events one way or the other. They're just another day to me; I don't celebrate anything personally.

Nowadays all I care about is making sure the younger relatives have a good day and ideally a gift they can play with for longer than a day or get longer term use out of.

By never talking about myself nor requesting anything as a gift, I've successfully avoided being a target / recipient myself for years now; I'm just the geeky relative that shows up with gifts for the kids and eats diner.

/r/AskReddit Thread