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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Healthiest != longest-living != “best.”

Going to the gym, running marathons, and other strenuous activities are generally done for the challenge, difficulty, or achievement of completing them. Personally, I’d take 60 years of a challenging, but meaningful life over 90 years of relaxation and low stress.

The secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas! Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as soon as you cannot be rulers and owners, you men of knowledge! The time will soon pass when you could be content to live concealed in the woods like timid deer.

- Nietzsche

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Let‘s talk again when you are 60. My father turned 66 and he looks about 10 years younger, and participates in life just like he did 20 years ago. Pick up my kids from school? Help me push the washing machine upstairs? Weed out a 9k square feet garden? Dig a tunnel in the garden for utility cables? Not a problem. I don’t think he would want to be dead for 6y now for having ran a couple marathons each year. He also always refused to come with me to the gym. He runs 8km every now and then because he has „too much energy“.

>Healthiest != longest-living != “best.”

I'm not sure what "best" means in this context.

But in the case of blue zones, longest living absolutely == healthiest. They have fewer of the ailments less longer living people have.

>Going to the gym, running marathons, and other strenuous activities are generally done for the challenge, difficulty, or achievement of completing them. Personally, I’d take 60 years of a challenging, but meaningful life over 90 years of relaxation and low stress.

As if the only challenges in life are the artificial fads/trends of the gym and marathon running (as promoted by an army of websites, books, influencers, gym chains, and co)? (and fads as in 10-15 years ago almost nobody -statistically speaking- run "marathons" compared to today, and 30 years ago mostly wannabe "boby-builders" where pumping iron at the gym).

All those things didn't catch on as challenges (that's just some handful of pioneers doing them as such), they are natural activity replacements for office drones forced to a sedimentary lifestyle.

>The secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously!

Yeah, Nietzsche didn't have marathons in mind, in fact he'd laugh at the proposition that "living dangerously" is following some sheepish trend.

Did you read the line in the article, "Moving naturally throughout the day might sound pleasant and romantic, but the reality is that 100 years ago only 10% of us had sedentary jobs, whereas today it’s 90%."?

Marathon running and weightlifting, and the popularity of such, are almost certainly correlated with a lack of meaningful physical activity in our day-to-day lives.

Also, your flippant dismissal of marathon running as a "sheepish trend" is laughable. Marathon and half-marathon event participation is declining [1] in the USA as a whole, and in 2016 507,600 people completed a full marathon and 1.9M completed a half. That's about 0.6% of the US population completing a half marathon or greater every year.

Marathons and other strength / athletic events are challenging, exhilarating, test the merits not only of your physical condition but your psychology as well, and, well, they're f*cking fun. You don't have to have the same fervor for them as the poster you're responding to, but calling them "sheepish trends" is ridiculous.

[1] https://running.competitor.com/2017/06/news/new-report-2016-...

> I’d take 60 years of a challenging, but meaningful life over 90 years of relaxation and low stress.

So you equate physical challenge with meaning, and physical relaxation with lack of it? Sorry, but not everyone finds meaning only in the same things you do. It seems likely that the vast majority whose lives revolve more around family/community or intellectual pursuits, or even pure leisure, would prefer 90 years of health just good enough to support those, rather than 60 years of being on leaderboards only a very few (perhaps only you) care about.

Also, how would you feel about only 50 years of a challenging but meaningful life as you define such things? Or 40? Or 30? Every year brings a possibility of some setback that puts that kind of physical fulfillment out of reach, and the probability tends to increase over time. Between genetics, dietary habits, smoking/drinking, occupational/environmental stress, infectious disease, or simple accidents, almost everyone hits some kind of limitation before 60. Sometimes through absolutely no fault of their own, and almost always before they expected. High-risk or high-physical stress activities only worsen those odds, and hyper-competitive "type A" behavior does so in specific well-understood ways.

There's no dichotomy between maximizing total years and maximizing good years. If you graph quality of life over time, extending the curve to the right also increases the time above any arbitrary threshold. The point of the article is that high-intensity exercise-for-its-own-sake might be less effective for such maximization than more frequent but less intense "incidental" exercise. If you have actually run a marathon, surely you know that sprinting the first mile won't get you across the finish line faster and might ruin your chances to get across it at all.

I think you are missing the point. I don't read this article as an argument AGAINST going to the gym, rather as a comment on the fact that if you want a healthy population, it is not gym membership which is the primary solution.

For me going to the gym is primarily about being healthy, and the does affect your happiness. Being unhealthy is bad for your own quality of life.

I have not been particularly good at going to the gym however, the last years. I remember finding it easier to get into in while living in a society which made natural exercise happen more regularly. E.g. when I lived in the Netherlands I biked about 1 hour of day, because that is often the made mode of transport and it is easy and convenient to do.

That has a positive re-enforcing circle. You feel better, which makes it easier to get to the gym as well. When your health goes down, going to the gym becomes mentally harder to do. It may be more expedient but doing almost anything benefits from feeling good and positive.

The article didn't say their lives were low stress. It talks about active transportation, mostly. I can assure you cycling to work doesn't remove all the stress from your life, and if you live in most modern cities or the US, it's probably adding to your stress level. It does get your heart going, though, and maybe more importantly gives a quick reminder of when you're letting yourself go a bit. If I eat badly for a while the first place I'll notice it is while exercising.

Other commonly cited commonalities to these Blue Zones are a sense of community and healthy diets. The only one I have any familiarity with, Loma Linda, has a lot of people who are quite involved in their church and a high incidence of vegetarianism. Dreadful place to get around by any mode other than car, though.

I can see how being involved with a community can be a good thing, but not so sure that being involved with a church community is a good thing, as it perpetuates their delusional biases. Also, you're implying vegetarianism is a healthier diet than a varied, balanced diet, I don't think that is necessarily the case (Mediterranean diet is known for being one of thw healthiest diets and it includes vegetables, meat, fish, eggs, fruits, etc)

>I can see how being involved with a community can be a good thing, but not so sure that being involved with a church community is a good thing, as it perpetuates their delusional biases.

We have all kinds of "delusional biases" in 2018 secular society as well. At least theirs have passed the test of time (not for being true, for being utilitarian).

Plus, not all church communities are like fundamentalist bible belt nuts. In Icaria for example, it would be more like going to a Dead Can Dance (or Enigma) concert and meeting some friends for 1 hour, celebrating some wedding, mourning some dead at a funeral, at so on. It wouldn't dictate what you do with your everyday life.

Even fundamentalist bible belt people can be good company. Some of the nicest, kindest, most helpful people I know secretly worry I'm on a fast path to hell. They'd never say it since judgement is sinful, but I know they think it.

That's true, I shouldn't be dismissive.

What I meant is that depending on the church and regional culture church communities don't necessarily come with the "austere fundamental parents", "no puffs or artists in our family", "sex is sin" etc cliches.

I'm not endorsing the religion, and I'm not religious myself. However I did attend a Seventh Day Adventist high school, and for several years, church, and the community aspect is something I dearly miss. Knowing that every Saturday you'll go hang out with friends and chat and maybe go to the beach and generally take it easy was really nice. It was also the sort of place you could go and know nobody would accuse you of delusional biases, unlike online communities like HN.

I'm a doubtful agnostic these days, but people who've never been could try talking to churchgoers to discover their motivations. Seeing friends and knowing it's a pretty safe place are big draws.

Of course, I was pretty lucky to be at, by SDA standards, a _very_ liberal church, and straight. I also had a good secular and Catholic education before attending the SDA school, which had horrendous standards (and creationism). And I now live in a place where the horrors of a state religion are laid bare - google "babies" and "septic tank".

But there are big positives that are hard to replicate. I also really miss the "I. Do. Not. Work. On. The. Sabbath." (standard disclaimer forfirefighters, emt, etc) side of things. Everyone here who has burned out might appreciate the idea of one day reserved for family, friends, and reflection.

Also, c'mon, a person following a vegetarian diet is at _least_ paying more attention to what they eat then most, and animal fats are not particularly healthy. Comparing to the best diets including animals (basically fish heavy ones) doesn't mean that vegetarian isn't better than the standard western diet.

Healthiest != longest-living != “best.”

Of course not. But just in case, to check your theory, go to the local hospital and speak with some of the doctors and nurses. Ask them if their patients took better care of themselves, how things might be different.

I think it's safe to presume you need not ask the patients and their families if they're happy to be in hospital. Again?

Yes, you can live a happy unhealthy life - to a point. But when things go sideways - and for most of us at some point they do / will - your general health at the start of that event is going to have a fairly significant impact on outcomes and going forward.

Sure, for example, you can survive a stroke. The med system is good for that. But trying to walk slightly compromised (e.g., paralyzed and/or balance) and suddenly that extra 50 - 100 lbs of happiness (i.e., soda, donuts, etc.) isn't so happy any more.

And then when you factor in your personal (loss of) best, as well as the best lost by your family and friends (i.e., it's not going to only impact you), that aggregate "best" is going to end up a negative.

Again. You can find this answer at any hospital.

I was juxtaposing "longest-living" and "healthiest" against "physically intense", not being unhealthy and overweight.

I lift weights everyday and run competitively, and I wouldn't give up the post-workout feeling for anything, even if it theoretically makes me only live to be 70 instead of 80. It's a quality > quantity thing for me.

Assuming that the quality lies in the "post-workout feeling", which is a pretty wild assumption.

> I wouldn't give up the post-workout feeling for anything

I'll bet most heroin addicts would say something similar. Do you approve of their choices also? If not, why not? What is it that makes your high different than theirs?

The article mentions that those people who live longer than average lives without gym memberships do in fact have a very active life, as in they grow their own food and such. For what it’s worth I find that growing your own food is a lot more fulfilling than winning marathons and similar stuff, but to each his/her own.

I decided to try growing some of my own food this summer. I live in a small apartment in Stockholm and was inspired on a trip to Glastonbury Tor, where I bought some heritage seeds. It was much too late in the season to plant this stuff when I got back, but I was too impatient and sprouted some peas, tomatoes, and a single lettuce leaf seed. They are now in big pots, the peas on my small balcony and the rest inside since it's just too cold now. I have a bunch of pea pods maturing, and I harvested my first lettuce leaf last week (just the one leaf, it was delicious, the rest of the plant is still maturing). I doubt the tomatoes will come to anything this season, but they're still alive, now in big pots near the window.

As someone who at least used to be a bit of a fitness junkie (and still am in some respects), the joy of seeing your little sprouted peas grow huge and start flowering is (for me) on a completely different plane of joy than that of finishing some obstacle course race. Both are really great, but I've never felt as happy getting a deadlift PR as I did when I ate my very first home-grown lettuce leaf.

To each their own. I've grown lots of edibles (my favorite is the zucchini that became zucchini bread). I'll take a PR on a lift any day. My last deadlift PR had me on cloud nine, practically nothing could have brought me down.

> [Nietzsche quote]

"For those who fight for it, life has a flavor the protected will never know" - Anonymous

Nietzsche is a pretty bad source for life advice.

If you want to run a marathon for the challenge - more power to you. But running and training for a marathon is far from healthy.

After a certain point there are diminishing returns on running and at a certain point over that there are actually statistically negative consequences.

https://www.active.com/running/articles/the-risks-and-benefi...

"Instead, they live in environments that constantly nudge them into moving without even thinking about it. "

For the rest of us, there is the squat rack. And riding to work.

> Personally, I’d take 60 years of a challenging, but meaningful life over 90 years of relaxation and low stress.

This reads like satire.

Do you have a real criticism, or are you just being flippant with the middlebrow dismissal?

Not everyone is trying to live the most comfortable, stress-free existence. Many philosophers, religious leaders, and thinkers throughout history have posited (correctly, in my opinion) that a challenge-free life is not a particularly meaningful one.

I'm glad you find meaning in struggle. But you said it yourself "not everyone".

And how do you define struggle? is it physical challenges or mental ones? There's a lot of grey area here too.

Personally I would like to live happy, I would trade years of my life for happiness, but being in the gym does not make me happy by itself.

There's plenty of meaning to be found in all sorts of endeavours, including going to the gym. I just think you sound defensive when you imply there's no meaning in a life full of relaxation and no stress.

I also find it a bit amusing that you bring up a Nietzsche quote in your edit. AFAIK Nietzsche didn't go to the gym or run any marathons. He did, however, go for a long walk every morning.

The long walks were not very effective: "Nietzsche resigned in 1879 [at the age of ~34] due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889 at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward, a complete loss of his mental faculties."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche

Correlation != causation.

We know from actual studies (not a single anecdote) that long walks are very effective in improving health.

We also know that Nietzsche had prior health issues, the kind that long walks wont fix.

Being around that age myself, I want another 30 years.

Edit: as many years as possible. I have no desire to check out. I like being alive.

Every man dies. Not every man really lives. -William Wallace, Braveheart

I like the general message, although pep talks like this have led many people into stupid fights.

"Let's just do it and be legends man!"

Sorry Fyre Festival has better pep talk than Braveheart.

The William Wallace depicted in Braveheart never really lived.

"there is no way of knowing who he really was. ...The most famous quote from the movie, “Every man dies, not every man really lives,” is ironic in that the William Wallace of myth and legend never really existed"

https://peterrock12.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/braveheart-%E2%...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wallace

Personally, I’d you can live a «challenging life» without going to the gym or similar.

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