Putting an age on the body and mind

Is Richard Fitzpatrick having an early midlife crisis? He can’t resist trying out the internet tools that put an age on different parts of your body and mind

Up until the Enlightenment era, the average punter’s abiding question was: “How can I be saved?” Then someone came along – propelled by a desire to venerate the self over God – and changed it to: “How can I be happy?” Now somebody has gone and switched the query again to: “How can I look younger?”

There’s no escaping it – we live in an age that glorifies eternal youth. If you scratch the surface of the internet, you’ll get bombarded with online tests that prey on this neurosis. Microsoft has come up with a website that invites users to answer the question “How old do I look?” You upload a photo of yourself and a piece of face-prediction software guesses your age (and gender).

I tried it and was surprised to find I supposedly look like a 37-year-old, four years younger than my real age. I did, however, post a second photo of myself in a squatting position and my age shot up to 44. If I’d tried with a photo taken while doing chin-ups, it surely would have coughed up an age closer to how haggard I really feel. I took the “What’s your Disney age?” online quiz and it pinned me as 450 years old.

Richard Fitzpatrick had fun trying to work out his internet age. The near 43 year old has the mind of a 28 year old.

I am in that cohort of middle-aged people who feel squeezed, that moment when your career and childrearing collides, when you hanker after sleep more than socialising. My memory is shot. It’s not so much, though, that I can’t remember things. More that my retrieval times have slowed to a deathly rate so, say, when I see an actor on a TV show I vaguely recognise, his or her name or the film I know them from will come, but usually an hour later, just the amount of time needed to irritatingly distract me until the programme finishes.

I was not surprised to discover, therefore, that the World Health Organisation published a recent study which found depression to be “the single leading cause of disability for people in midlife”, a period in which it seems the only compensation, as noted by New York Times columnist Pamela Druckerman, is that you and your wife know each other’s ritual arguments so well that you finish them in a tenth of the time.

We live longer lives than our great grandparents’ generation. That is true, but in many ways so much stays the same. Victor Hugo was telling us a century and a half ago that 40 years of age is “the old age of youth”. Needless to say he wouldn’t bat an eyelid if he were around today to see the number of deranged MAMILs (middle aged men in lycra) careering around Ireland’s byways on racing bicycles every Saturday morning.

The Death Clock test, or as it bills itself “the Internet’s friendly reminder that life is slipping away” doesn’t shy away from cold truths. Its seven-question exam told me I have 451,797,493 seconds left to live, or at least it did at the time of writing. This will apparently see me kick dirt around the place until Thursday, 5 July 2061, which will give me time to procrastinate on chores for dozens of years more. If, however, I adjust my outlook from “optimistic” to “pessimistic” it says I’ll be departing this bag of bones on an April day less than eight years from now. Really? A sunnier disposition can add 30-plus years to your life expectancy?

There are many more of these ridiculous age tests online. Knock yourself out. The www.age-test.com asks howlers like “Do you want to grow up?” and believes that my age should be 28 given my frame of mind. The test on the My Mental Age website asks for the answer to life’s mystifying questions like “Do baseball caps look better backwards or forwards?” It churned out 42 years of age for me when I took it, which startled me briefly (as my 42nd birthday is next month) until I re-did the test quickly ticking the first answer in each of its 20 multiple-choice queries and it returned an age of 43 years old, which suggests to me it knows more about the sorcery of cookies software than the riddle of a person’s age.

The only interesting one I stumbled upon is the “How old are your ears?” YouTube test, which accurately guesses what decade of life you’re in by making you listen to a series of hissing frequency sounds. Interestingly the inner ear – unlike other organs like the liver and skin – doesn’t have the capacity to regenerate its cells. Our hearing just gets progressively worse as we age.

But don’t worry. We age and one day we die. There’s nothing to be done about it. Best to live by Billy Connolly’s dictum when it comes to age: “if you must lie about your age, do it the other direction – tell people you are 97 and they will think you look great.”