Is 2019 special year because everyone is the same age? Fact Check

ByCraig Haley

A message spreading online claims that 2019 is a “special year” because everyone in the world is the same age. The message offers to “prove” the claim by inviting readers to add their age to their year of birth which should add up to 2019, and this phenomenon only happens once every thousand years.

FALSE

An example of the message can be seen below –

All the people in the world are of the same age this year!
It’s amazing: this year all the people in the world are all in the same age group, all equal to 2019. This year is special. It happens only once every 1,000 years. This year your age + your year of birth, each individual is = 2019. For example, you are 55 years old and you were born in 1964, which adds up to 2019. Very strange, even the Chinese and foreign masters can not explain.
Please calculate and see if the answer is 2019. It’s a thousand-year wait!

The message is quite nonsensical, and the claim that 2019 is “special” and that this happens only once every thousand years is complete fiction.

To clarify, when you add your age to your year of birth, you will always get the current year, providing you have already celebrated your birthday during the current year (otherwise you’ll get the previous year.) After all, this is essentially how we calculate how old we are.


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To expand on that, we typically calculate how old we are by determining the difference between our year of birth and current year…

Year of Birth + Age = Current Year.

Again, providing you have already celebrated your birthday in the current year, this formula is true no matter what year it is. It was true in 2018, and will be true in 2020. There is nothing special about 2019. In fact a very similar different rumour did spread online in 2018.

Variants of this rumour claim that 2019 being a special year has “baffled” mathematicians. Of course this is pure nonsense. It isn’t likely to baffle anyone with a rudimentary understanding of maths, let alone mathematicians.