Once every thousand years “your age + your year of birth, every person = 2022.”
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Does not compute: This math problem’s solution isn’t a once-in-a-millennium phenomenon
If Your Time is short
- For several years, social media posts have claimed that adding your age and your birth year will yield the same answer for everyone on Earth for one day only. But that’s not right.
For one day every thousand years, adding your age and the year you were born will total to 2022 — at least according to some Facebook lore.
"Amazing!" a Sept. 10 post said. "Everyone’s age today is 2022. Did you know that today the whole world is the same age! Today is a very special day and only happens once every thousand (1,000) years. Your age + your year of birth, every person = 2022. It’s so strange that even experts can’t explain it! You check it out and see if it’s 2022. It has been waiting for a thousand years. Example: I am 68 years old. I was born in 1954. So 68 + 1954 = 2022."
This post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook.)
In reality, this phenomenon will happen every day for the rest of the year after your birthday passes in 2022. Because that’s how you calculate your age, no matter what year you’re in or what day it is.
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This nugget of misinformation has persisted online for several years; versions of it were debunked by Snopes in 2018 and the Australian Associated Press in 2019.
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We rate the claim that this is a once-in-a-millennium phenomenon False.
Correction, Sept. 26, 2022: This fact-check and its headline have been corrected to reflect that the claim in this post was that this only happened once every 1,000 years, or once in a millennium. The rating is unchanged.
Our Sources
Facebook post, Sept. 10, 2022
Australian Associated Press, Age and birth year claim doesn’t occur every 1000 years, Oct. 7, 2019
Tweet, June 15, 2017
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Does not compute: This math problem’s solution isn’t a once-in-a-millennium phenomenon
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