This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they’re going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here.
During last week’s Apple Watch announcement, I let out a distinct “Noooo!” in the Steve Jobs Theater. Along with a new readiness metric and a redesigned Health app, Apple had just announced that later this year, it’d be introducing a new longevity feature called Health Age.
This is a familiar concept in the wearable and health tech world. The idea is that if you put effort into your health and fitness, your physiological age could be “younger” than your chronological age. (Or older if you’re not putting in the effort.) Whoop has “Whoop age.” Oura has a “cardiovascular age” metric. My Withings scale just introduced various “longevity intelligence” features that include separate “heart age” and “vascular age” metrics. Garmin also has a “fitness age score.” At CES, I sat in front of a so-called longevity mirror that measured the blood flow in my face from a 30-second selfie to estimate my “physiological age” and my “facial skin age.” Earlier this week, I woke up and found out that my $5,000 smart mattress topper is also estimating my “biological age.”
If you ask Whoop, I’m supposedly 42. Over the past two years, Oura says my heart has been anywhere from seven years younger to 1.5 years younger than my chronological age. (It’s currently sitting at two years younger.) Withings says my vascular age is a year older than I am, while my heart is four years younger. Garmin says my fitness age is 36.5 years old. That longevity mirror? My facial skin age was apparently 26 (sunscreen, baby!), while my physiological age was 35. My very rude bed said I’m “trending older” this week at 38.7 years old.
My actual age is 38 years old — and that’s what I’m sticking with.
I’m not trying to rain on Apple’s (or other wearable makers’) parade. Frankly, I won’t rule on Apple’s version of the feature until I can test it for myself. I bring this all up to illustrate a point about when this type of feature can be genuinely helpful — and when you should treat it with a healthy dose of skepticism. As with most metrics, it’s all in the framing.
It’s true that through a healthy diet, good sleeping habits, and regular exercise, your physiological condition might be better than that of other people who are the same age and fit within a similar demographic. Depending on how a company defines its various longevity-related age scores, your results can identify areas where you can improve. For example, my Whoop age is somewhat cursed because it heavily weights strength training workouts in the algorithm. The last time I tested Whoop, I wasn’t going super hard on lifting heavy and perhaps was a bit too into cardio. If I wanted my Whoop age to improve, lifting weights would’ve been an easy way to tilt that number in my favor.
Objectively, recalibrating my training habits to be more balanced would be a good thing for my long-term health. If you leave it exactly at that, there’s nothing wrong with this type of feature. But culturally speaking, that’s not how these “health age” scores work.
The way I’ve seen people talk about this metric largely hews toward fluffing up your ego. If your health age is older, you probably don’t talk about it. It’s “shameful” even though, really, it’s not. That’s because culturally — at least in the West — getting old isn’t considered a good thing. If your health age is younger, it becomes something to bandy about. Apple’s vice president of health, Sumbul Desai, even says in this Instagram Reel that Health Age could be something you brag about to your friends. That explains why tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, famous for his quest to never die, would post this absurd take on X about how aliens would struggle to distinguish him from his teenage son, alongside a chart titled “Is Bryan Johnson More 18 or 49?” Johnson is 49; he looks a little younger, maybe, and his metrics might be comparable to someone much younger on average, but his current state is ultimately just what 49 looks like for him.
Furthermore, your wearable-determined age is oftentimes not capturing the whole picture. You could game the Whoop Age metric to the letter, get your annual physical, and find out that your cholesterol level is through the roof. A reader once related this exact story to me. You could optimize all the controllable lifestyle health factors — diet, exercise, and sleep — like Bryan Johnson and still end up with autoimmune gastritis, as he has. Some of your health is encoded in your genetics, and while you can better the odds, your ultimate fate is not always something you can decide. We all know of someone who was healthy as a horse and died tragically young because of a freak accident.
Personally, my various health ages have always indicated I’m moderately younger than my chronological age. But even then, that’s not an accurate picture of how I’m aging either. I’m definitely fitter now at 38 than I was at 18. As a teen, I couldn’t even run a mile nonstop, and in my 30s, I have multiple half-marathons under my belt. But my bones also snap, crackle, and pop more. I can’t pull all-nighters without caffeine like I used to, even though I eat much healthier. It doesn’t matter what potions I slather on my hair or what supplements I take; the grays keep coming. I was fitter last year, and my wearables all praised my consistent training to the point that I kept getting injured. I’m less fit this year. I’ve lost roughly 5 pounds of muscle, if smart scales are to be believed, but my metabolic biomarkers are all much, much, much healthier. To the point where earlier this week, my doctor patted me on the back and said she saw all the effort I’d put in over the past year. Yet until recently, my wearables were all convinced my health was in a death spiral.
Health ages, I genuinely believe, were meant to be a helpful way of visualizing how small lifestyle changes can improve overall health as you age. But because they’re all defined differently and use a range of parameters, they’ve become these odd “scores” that can pass faulty judgments on how well you’re doing. I look at my hodgepodge of “ages,” and I can’t tell you what any of it truly means.
Not to get too philosophical, but time, as far as we know it, can only move forward. My rude bed is kind of right. Every week, I will be trending older because that’s simply how time works. No matter the wearable metric or magic new drug, none of us is Benjamin Buttoning our way out of that fact.
Which brings me to my current philosophy: I am irreversibly 38, and am doing pretty alright if you ask me.
