Why We Can’t Stop Asking the Internet How Old We Look

When I was 17, I used to babysit a handful of preschoolers every Thursday afternoon. They were loud, sticky, and endlessly curious the kind of kids who asked questions you didn’t know you needed an answer for until they asked them.

One of their favorite games was “Guess Your Age.” It always began the same way: a little face peering up at me, eyes squinted like a detective in a cartoon.

“Are you… twelve?”

“Nope.”

“Forty?”

“Not even close.”

“Are you nine? A hundred?”

Their guesses were chaos. They had no frame of reference. In their world, anyone older than five might as well be ancient or barely out of kindergarten. There was no real difference between a teenager, a thirty-year-old, or someone’s grandmother.

Back then, it was hilarious. I’d laugh, shake my head, and let them spiral into even wilder guesses.

Today, I don’t need a pack of toddlers to have that experience. All I have to do is open TikTok.

Somewhere along the way, guessing people’s ages became the internet’s favorite pastime. Entire filters exist to “predict” how old you look. You’ll see strangers tilting their phones, squinting into the camera, waiting for an algorithm to pass judgment like some pixelated oracle. The comments section is even worse:

“No way she’s 32.”

“She looks 25 at most.”

“More like 40, babe.”

We’ve turned age into a guessing game for millions of anonymous spectators half flattery, half public roasting. And we’re strangely obsessed with it.

Maybe it’s because age has always been a slippery thing. On paper, it’s just a number, a neat little fact printed on your driver’s license. But in reality? It’s a feeling. It’s how your bones creak in the morning, how your face changes in the bathroom mirror, how strangers treat you on the street.

The internet has simply taken our complicated relationship with age and turned it into performance art. Sometimes it feels harmless/funny, even. But other times, it’s a reminder of just how much we crave validation… or how much we fear the truth staring back at us.The preschoolers I babysat didn’t care about wrinkles, laugh lines, or whether my skin looked “youthful.” They just saw a person, an age-shaped mystery they could poke at for fun. The internet? Not so innocent.

And maybe that’s why I sometimes wish we could go back to the days when the wildest guess I got was, “Are you 100?”