What is Your Real Age?

I don’t know why I am into self-diagnostics on the web right now. But this was too amusing to pass up.

In Silicon Valley, where legend is based on people making $1 Billion before they are 30, age can be a funny thing. Health is also paradoxical in Silicon Valley. Being in California, it’s not hard to find a large number of people eating well, working out, running marathons, and generally being Californian. At the same time, the engineer culture doesn’t always emphasize good eating (jolt cola, mountain dew, pizza) or good exercise (Warcraft III doesn’t get you outdoors much).

The Real Age website obviously is playing of the current trend of emphasizing that depending on your health, you may actually healthier or less healthy than average for your age. They seem to want to sell you programs and information on how to improve your “real age”.

It’s funny… if I click the other tabs, it tells me I can get down to 21.5 in just 90 days! But if I go the wrong way, I could be as old as 43.4 in the same time.

Maybe the reason this caught my eye is because I’m still smarting from the practical joke Seema Shah played on me for my 30th birthday at eBay. She was assigned as my birthday fairy, and she put posters all over the building saying, “Happy 40th Birthday, Adam!”

The worst part was that people believed it… they kept saying things like, “Wow, I didn’t know your were 40! You look good – I would have thought you were 36 or something.”

Well RealAge says I’m 25.2… so I’m going to run with that for the rest of the day.