The Young and The Restless | The age-old question: Who do you believe?

Come to think of it, it’s stuck with me a good few days because now I’m even writing about it long after I probably should have let it go.

Face ID didn’t recognise me.

Advanced facial recognition technology could not even identify my morning face.

Is there anything more insulting?

My phone sees so many different versions of me: the tired one, the made-up one, the make-up-free one, the tipsy one, the post-lawn mowing one, the red-faced one working out, the crying one, the smiling one.

You get the picture.

But apparently my phone doesn’t.

It got me thinking about ageing.

Well more so.

Thanks to peri-menopause, that subject is pretty much forefront of my mind on a daily anyway.

But, I wondered, if you don’t upgrade your phone for five years, do the biometrics adjust after a prediction of what your head might look like five years older, like those face-ageing apps?

Or, do we get to a point where our phones just stop recognising us and we have to update our visual key to a wrinklier and greyer image?

My phone not recognising my morning face was possibly the first indication it could be the latter.

I don’t know. All this stuff is a bit over my head.

They say technology leaves you behind the older you get too, so that’s not surprising.

How about stretching?

I keep thinking I might need a hip or knee replacement in a few years.

My back is so sore every morning and my fingers stiff with arthritis that I can’t even lift the mattress to tuck my blankets in when I first get out of bed.

I have to work up to that. Thaw out, loosen up, get some hot running water on the joints and muscles before I can return and do the job.

But, the experts say nope, you’re not injured, you’re just old.

“Stretch. Then stretch some more. In fact, dedicate a percentage of every single day for the rest of your life to stretching. On top of everything else you have to find time for.”

Physical therapists are now telling us to stretch before we even get out of bed.

Then there’s the nagging question of who you listen to?

I had one natural therapist tell me to sit outside in the sun for 10 minutes every morning, without sunglasses or sun protection on, because we’re all Vitamin D deficient these days due to being sun-smart.

She said supplements gave us about 30 times less the dosage we’d get from 10 minutes being bathed in the real deal.

But the very next week, a skin therapist told me to constantly put sunscreen on, even if I didn’t think I needed it because I was only going to “be in the sun for 10 minutes or so”.

Sometimes it feels like you cannot win in this world full of irony and contradiction.

I grow more confused the older I get and the more I learn.

Like, why is mercury bad in the fish we eat, but okay in vaccines?

(For the record, I don’t think it’s okay in either.)

I’m forever listing pros and cons against each other in my head, weighing up the lesser of two evils.

We’re burdened with having to do our own extensive research because we can’t take anyone else’s word for it.

Most advice is just marketing.

Someone’s trying to make money.

Every solution has a for and against argument anyway.

You just have to pick the benefit you want over the sacrifice you have to make for it.

Despite my (frail) bones to pick with the world in my wildly mood-swinging change-of-life era, I am grateful I’m getting older.

Many, heartbreakingly, are not gifted the privilege.

So, I guess my solution might be to toughen up my crepey skin and not take my phone’s failure to recognise my rough morning face as an insult.

Or, maybe I’ll stick my head in the sand to get it out of the sun and buy a new phone instead.