“I don't think health age is necessarily an evil thing, you know, but I am sick of how if it's younger, it's better.” Victoria Song · Tech News Weekly (Audio)
September 2026
Song has been writing about the 'health age' scores that wearables now report. She is reacting to Bryan Johnson's claim that an alien couldn't tell him apart from his teenage son, and asks why a lower number should always count as a win when it throws out lived experience.
Transcript
I am 38. I think I'm doing pretty great for 38, actually. And I was basically like, when I look at these scores in the morning, I'm just like, are we, are we serious here right now? Because it's not, you know, all of these companies have their own formula as to what they weight and how that impacts your overall score and age. And some of them will weight certain factors more than other factors. But it's also just kind of depending on when you test it and what stage of life you're in. Like I've been a runner now for over a decade, right? A regular running that has made me a fitter person now at 38 than I was as a teenager at 18. Like my cardiovascular health now, it's like objectively better. I couldn't run a mile when I was 18. And in my 30s, I've run multiple half marathons and I regularly go running. It's just a fact of my life. So, you know, do does the health age really kind of measure my health age now, or is it measuring the whole progress of my life? It's not doing that, right? It's not telling me that I'm actually healthier or fitter now than I was when I was 18 in terms of like cardiovascular fitness. Was I lifting weights at 18? Absolutely not. I do now, not as regularly as I probably should because I don't love strength training, but I do engage in it because I know it'll help me be a better runner, right? I don't eat as many french fries as I did when I was 18 and had a great metabolism. My metabolism at, you know, midlife is not what it was. So there's like different things based on the stage of life that you're in. And, you know, one thing that I've heard from readers is, you know, you go through big life events. You go through periods of great stress, great grief, great joy. Those will all impact your health in different ways. There's different seasons of life. A person who is a new parent is going to have different abilities to eat, sleep, take care of themselves than a person who doesn't have any kids or whose kids have flown the nest. So, you know, like these kinds of scores, they don't tell you the whole picture of what your health is because health is a holistic thing. So it can be a snapshot. It can tell you areas of the life of your life where you maybe need to put a little more effort, but it's not, it's not like a whole picture that you should be like, haha, I'm younger than my chronological age, whatever. Like, yeah, that's not, that's not.
That is honestly, I think, part of it. We'll kind of combine a couple of questions here because I think that the two words, shame and ego, play big roles when it comes to health age. I think there was even a talk of bragging about one's health age. And then as has been my experience, I know that VO2 Max is important. And when my Apple Watch says, that's the bro moment, bro, you need to work on your VO2 Max. I feel an immense amount of shame and sort of don't feel motivated to improve it because I just, you know, feel I have failed and that life is slipping away. And I'm 34, I think right now. Yes, that, or no, I will be 34 at the end of this year. And so I like life is not slipping away. I've still got quite a bit of it left, knock on wood. And so it's hard to kind of deal with that. But maybe the ego side of things, when we think about the people who are doing the quantified self a lot of the times, and we talk about this sort of longevity playing a role, that seems to be something that. Is a big part of this. You talked about, um, and now I'm missing it, but there was a part where you talked about the guy who's, oh, yeah, there it is. Uh, Brian Johnson's post about aliens not being able to tell him apart from his teenage son. What does that kind of culture do to the rest of us normal humans who are just uh looking at our smartwatch for some info?
Basically, Brian Johnson, he is kind of he's famous online for being a guy who is, you know, trying to defeat death. And he's a person who is optimal, he's trying to optimize himself all the time. And it was really funny because while I was writing this, I found a post of his where he was talking about like an alien wouldn't be able to tell that I'm 49 because I have like the biometrics of an 18-year-old, like an alien would have a hard time telling me apart from my teenage son. And I was looking at him and I was like, No, I don't think they would. Um, and not in a mean way, you know, like I thought of it more as like, uh, what are we trying to say here? Like, he looks pretty decent for his age, but you're not 18. Like, your life experiences are completely different. So, I just, it was just very striking to me to be like, Why are you discounting the experience that you have and the things that have gotten you there? Like, it's not better to be 18 than 49 per se. Like, I don't think health age is necessarily an evil thing, you know, but I am sick of how if it's younger, it's better. And if it's older, you should feel what way about it. Like, I shouldn't feel what way about the fact that, you know, I downloaded the deaf beta of iOS 27 and it said that my health age is like 0.3 years higher than my actual age. And that's because I haven't been taking as much movement. I haven't taken been taking as many daily steps because I'm going to all these tech events in September and I'm not sleeping quite as regularly because I'm going to all these tech events in September. So, you know, I'm doing pretty great in the sense that it's pretty aligned with my age. I guess like I don't, it's one of those things where I think there's a genuinely helpful intent behind these features, but the way that it's communicated and the way that our culture feels about age is not always going to be a super helpful metric there. So that's just kind of how I feel about the shame and the ego side of it. I do know that like you are going to get some insufferable, insufferable people going, like, hey, my age is younger than my health, than my biological age. I'm in great health. And then some of them are going to go to the doctor and find out actually they have high cholesterol. Or some of them are going to, that's something that a reader shared with me, actually. Or, you know, some of them are going to go to the doctor and they're in great health, like Brian Johnson, actually, and find out that they have autoimmune gastritis, which is a thing that he has publicly shared that he has. There's factors that you can control in your health. And doctors will tell you that it's sleep regularly, exercise regularly, eat healthy most of the time. And that's very good advice to follow. Those are things in your control. But on the flip side, there are things that are not in your control. Like genetically speaking, we are all predisposed to certain things and not disposed to others. We all have heard of somebody who was like super healthy, did everything right, was in the prime of their life, and then dried it, died in like a freak accident. There's kind of like a grain of salt you have to take with all of these metrics and not get super obsessed with them. Because again, they're proprietary metrics. They're weighting certain things heavier than the other. I could probably get a lower whoop age if I just lifted a lot. Like,
true.
Sure. And that would be good for me. That's not a bad thing for me, right? It's just sort of like, it's not the whole picture because my metabolism is a part of the picture. And that's an invasive metric where I have to get a blood test to kind of measure that out. It's not taking into consideration the diet that I'm eating. What if I eat a bunch of fried chicken? What if I'm a smoker? But like, it's not everything. It's absolutely. Yeah.
It's only one part of the picture. It's one