milestones

It recently occurred to me - I've attended about as many funerals as I have weddings. (which is not many, admittedly, but nonetheless, the ratio still stands) I don't know why, but this statistic somehow seems significant. There ought to be a word for such milestones, if not in English then perhaps in Japanese or Korean; they tend to regard these things with importance and a sense of ceremony.

Birthdays seem to mean less and less these days; the celebrations are always fun but feel slightly incommensurate, like receiving praise for one's ability to stay on a conveyor belt. But things like funerals and weddings, they're like signs or badges by which you can gauge, not necessarily maturity, but the extent to which one has been actively involved in someone else's life - a battle scar, or something similar. To me, attending such events are a form of verification - actual proof of having lived some kind of life.

A standardized ruler or scale by which to measure one's growth and experience - why don't we have one of those?

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If life were a movie or novel, what would you choose to keep? Would you edit out the awkward pauses? Would you choose to skip small talk? Would you discard the time you spent waiting in line?
Were they all significant experiences? Were they all important people?