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To live to a ripe old age, it helps to laugh a lot, love a lot, engage with your community, and avoid stress. Walking regularly helps, especially uphill. Eat plant-based foods and avoid a sedentary lifestyle. Get out of your car and stay there. In other words, do a lot of things that many 21st-century Americans aren’t instinctively conditioned to do. Which might explain why watching Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zone, the new four-part Netflix docuseries featuring and executive produced by longevity evangelist Dan Buettner, could inspire an impulse to move to Sardinia, Italy, or Okinawa, Japan.
These are among the destinations Buettner visits to meet with centenarians and find out what makes them tick and stay breathing. Buettner has been at this for some time, having written several books on the subject over the last 20 years, and even used his research in an attempt to reverse engineer blue zones, or regions where people claim to live longer than average, in the U.S. He makes for an engaging guide, clearly enamored and sometimes in awe of his subjects, who are not just old but seemingly quite happy. Hopping along the globe, from Okinawa to Sardinia, Loma Linda, California to Nicoya, Costa Rica, Buettner gently prods: How do you live? What do you eat? Are you really as old as you say? (In one instance, a public records search reveals that the spry Costa Rican man who effortlessly hops on his horse and cuts grass with a machete is, as advertised, a centenarian). And, perhaps most important: How can we be more like you?
It all makes for a pleasant travelogue, which comes with what should be a troubling subtext for many American viewers. These people generally don’t eat fast food or drink soda. Instead of investing in gym memberships that they sporadically use, they organically weave physical activity into the fabric of their lives, walking where they need to go and working and making things with their hands, and tending the gardens that yield the fruits and vegetables they put into the bodies. They put quality of life over status and earning power. They are honor-bound to take care of their elders; you won’t see a lot of retirement homes in Live to 100. They have either gamed late-stage capitalism or avoided it altogether. They have stayed with the old ways and grown old along with them. In general, these seem to be not just longer lives, but also better lives.
But Buettner finds examples in modern living as well. Loma Linda, the Southern California city in San Bernardino County, lives under the heavy influence of its large Seventh-day Adventist population, with a doctrine of health and exercise bringing vigor and a strictly observed Sabbath mandating rest. Singapore makes driving exorbitantly expensive, so its residents walk and take public transportation (there is virtually no rush-hour traffic), and provides financial incentives for people to live near older family members. Fueled by blue zone zeal, Buettner took some of the lessons he learned abroad to American cities of varying size – Albert Lea, Minnesota; Fort Worth, Texas – and gained cooperation from civic and business leaders to create healthy blue pockets (but good luck getting a true Fort Worth resident to say no to a good steak or Tex-Mex meal).
Modernity, however, is a stubborn little sucker, and Buettner, who comes across a little like a more earnest Will Arnett, notes with dismay that some blue zones are getting less blue. Fast and processed food are more available than ever, capable of breaching the walls of even the oldest villages. Older generations, admirably resilient, are inevitably dying off, and youngsters want their chips and cookies and cell phones. Fortunately, the most intangible element of a longer life is also among the most available. In Okinawa they call it ikigai. In Nicoya, it’s plan de vida. You might call it a higher purpose, or a raison d’etre, or a reason to get up in the morning and keep doing it, again and again. A few years back I asked television pioneer Norman Lear, now 101, what keeps him going. He said he goes to bed every night thinking about the taste of the next morning’s cup of coffee. Diet, community, and activity level are all very important. But sometimes, you keep going because the other options just don’t sound like much fun.
