The Island Where People Forget to Die
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Great article. This importance of pervasive cultural factors was the key insight for me. I follow an unusual diet that happens to consist of 100% unprocessed foods. I allow myself to sleep when I'm tired. I live somewhere I can enjoy long walks and other fun exercise. I'm never late because I don't set schedules.
> In the United States, you can’t go to a movie, walk through the airport or buy cough medicine without being routed through a gantlet of candy bars, salty snacks and sugar-sweetened beverages. The processed-food industry spends more than $4 billion a year tempting us to eat. How do you combat that? Discipline is a good thing, but discipline is a muscle that fatigues. Sooner or later, most people cave in to relentless temptation.
This is the trouble with following a different lifestyle; almost every aspect of it conflicts with modern culture. Buying vegetables at a store, there's tasty frozen pizza across the isle. Going out with friends, for variety and a normal social atmosphere, modern-influenced food is the only option. Walk into a gas station and there's the chips. Look at cat pics on the internet and there's pictures of beer and bacon. Everyone wants to set a schedule, out of habit if not the belief that stress increases productivity. People call to talk late at night.
Even after forming good habits, every instance of conflict with the culture requires some willpower, and socially, each requires an explanation. The only way I've succeeded is when living a more isolated lifestyle, somewhere remote. That leaves out cultural enjoyment and reinforcement.
I'd love to do that. But I also love my job so I sit in an air-conditioned office for 8 hours a day. If I am tired I have to drink coffee. I try to eat healthily(only organic food),but it's still not enough. I could abandon all of it and live in a wilderness somewhere,but unfortunately it's not sustainable on a larger scale.
It just takes will power but it hasn't ever been easier. The overall population has more access to healthful, natural foods than in the past. I'm always amazed that on many street corners in NYC a vendor is willing to sell you produce at incredible prices (4 bananas for $1, $2 for a small cart of blueberries, etc) considering that many of these products come from thousands of miles away and are incredibly perishable.
Discovering communities that share your beliefs and lifestyle is also a lot easier today than it has been.
I think a lot of people that don't ascribe to this healthful lifestyle just have different values. Some people like cheap processed food. It's a lot more consistent and convenient than many other food products. I don't believe in any kind of global conspiracy that wants to push foods bad for your health or inactive lifestyles. I guess maybe its less depressing to think that societal forces manipulate people rather than the idea that people make conscious health related trade-offs for their own reasons.
In both cases people rushed to find some explanation for why the events happened in clusters like they did. What were the Germans trying to target? What's in the water/air that's causing cancer? But if you distribute things completely at random, you end up with the same sort of clusters purely by chance.
So if everyone has a given percent chance of living to a certain age, and it's randomly distributed throughout the world, you'd expect that there would be some clusters where groups of people living a long time show up by chance. It's not quite that simple of course, because longevity isn't independent from one person to the next. e.g. if everyone in your family lives a really long time, there's a good chance you'll live a really long time too. But I'd be curious to see if these clusters happen at a greater incidence than one would expect them to randomly occur or if there's even some way to measure that.
>> if everyone in your family lives a really long time, there's a good chance you'll live a really long time too
This implies assumption of some sort of cause, which one would then expect to hold in other parts outside that cluster, too. Which I understood as: the island's longevity could be random -- but not really.
This is probably true and helps a lot. But who created the statistics? The pension system there is widely misused. People keep their death parents "alive" on paper to receive their pension for many years. It was so widespread and the loss so great in Creek (and some other EU countries) that the European Union intervened.
In fact, the pension system in Greece has been following the European standards since at least 10 years.
I am so sick and tired of outsiders spewing nonsense all of the internet about Greece without knowing any real fact.
Search for "greek pension abuse" on Google:
* Greece pulls the plug on pensions for the dead (Apr 25, 2012): http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/25/greece-benefits-id...
* 2% of Greek population abuse pension system (26 Apr, 2012): https://www.devere-group.com/news/Greek-population-abuse-pen...
* Greece Still Paying Dead Pensioners (Aug 17, 2013): http://greece.greekreporter.com/2013/08/17/greece-still-payi...
* New Greek finance sham: 120,000 families claiming 'ghost pensions' for relatives who died years ago (12 October 2011): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2048385/Greek-financ...
Title: "120,000 families claiming 'ghost pensions' for relatives who died years ago"
Actual content: "Greece has halted welfare or pension payments to 200,000 people either because they are unentitled to the money - or because they are dead, a Labour Ministry official said on Wednesday."
Not that the 200.000 number includes all pensions under examination -- and most of those were found to be absolutely OK in subsequent checks.
So, first the "dead getting pensions" were far from "120,000" (more close to a few thousands -- and of those "dead cases" most were recent deaths of a few months were the reported death wasn't yet registered (the bureacracy is chaotic).
The final tally was some 40.000 problematic pensions (which in a huge messy bureacracy like Greece includes pensions missing a few supporting documents, having 1% less "pension credits" than needed, etc), and around 2.500 cases of "dead pensioners".
Moreover, of those "dead pensioners" most were cases of people who died with no relatives etc and weren't declared to stop the pension being deposited. Of the 35 million euros deposited to dead pensioners, the state found that the 21 million euros were such and reclaimed it immediately ( http://www.enet.gr/?i=news.el.article&id=380165 ). The rest could be actual fraud cases.
Not as impressive as the BS baity headlines that preceded the investigation one year before. The government merely wanted to give an impression of wide corruption, in order to sweeten the passage of some anti-pension laws.
Both the pension fraud and the early retirement age in Greece where hotly debated and well documented topics, not "rumors".
I think the problem here lies in the different cultural perception of the phrase "widely misused". For Greek values, 1% is a bureaucratic rounding error. For North European values it's sign of massive corruption.
'What Wolf slowly realized was that the secret of Roseto wasn't diet or exercise or genes or the region where Roseto was situated. It had to be the Roseto itself. As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they began to realize why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited each other, stopping to chat with each other in Italian on the street, or cooking for each other in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town's social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to Mass at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2000 people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the town, that discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.
In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills.
"I remember going to Roseto for the first time, and you'd see three generational family meals, all the bakeries, the people walking up and down the street, sitting on their porches talking to each other, the blouse mills where the women worked during the day, while the men worked in the slate quarries," Bruhn said. "It was magical."'
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/books/chapters/chapter-out...
Wow, that is patriarchal oppression and stifling familial roles.
Oppression and stifling social norms cause the very same stress that these guys appear to have managed to avoid. It appears that they've found their own norms that, to a naive observer, look stifling or oppressive, when the net effect is that the average level of social comfort actually increases. Call it "traditional gender roles" or "acceptance of social inequality" if that fits your particular bias, but you cannot take such a value judgement and call it "oppression".
Obviously, the oppression and stifling isn't felt, that's the equilibrium, but I would guess that you would feel it very quickly if you tried to rock the boat. I strongly doubt that a openly gay, openly atheist couple (so, totally uncontroversial in most cities in Europe) would enjoy a happy, laid back lifestyle with plenty of daily socialising in Ikaria. I doubt that a straight, church-going couple that had married against their (Ikaria) parents will would do so.
When social conservatives long for the lost world of the past, it's places like Ikaria they have in mind.
It's not like the past won't become the future again.
Getting off-topic for me here, but...
From "The Fate Of Empires" 1978, by John Glubb, who was Lieutenant General and commander of Jordan's Arab Legion:
"The works of the contemporary historians of Baghdad in the early tenth century are still available. They deeply deplored the degeneracy of the times in which they lived, emphasising particularly the indifference to religion, the increasing materialism and the laxity of sexual morals. They lamented also the corruption of the officials of the government and the fact that politicians always seemed to amass large fortunes while they were in office.
The historians commented bitterly on the extraordinary influence acquired by popular singers over young people, resulting in a decline in sexual morality. The ‘pop’ singers of Baghdad accompanied their erotic songs on the lute, an instrument resembling the modern guitar. In the second half of the tenth century, as a result, much obscene sexual language came increasingly into use, such as would not have been tolerated in an earlier age. Several khalifs issued orders banning ‘pop’ singers from the capital, but within a few years they always returned.
An increase in the influence of women in public life has often been associated with national decline. The later Romans complained that, although Rome ruled the world, women ruled Rome. In the tenth century, a similar tendency was observable in the Arab Empire, the women demanding admission to the professions hitherto monopolised by men. ‘What,’ wrote the contemporary historian, Ibn Bessam, ‘have the professions of clerk, tax-collector or preacher to do with women? These occupations have always been limited to men alone.’ Many women practised law, while others obtained posts as university professors. There was an agitation for the appointment of female judges, which, however, does not appear to have succeeded.
Soon after this period, government and public order collapsed, and foreign invaders overran the country. The resulting increase in confusion and violence made it unsafe for women to move unescorted in the streets, with the result that this feminist movement collapsed. "
That's actually BS based on urban legends (and inflated by the Greek government at the time for political reasons).
On actual life, this involved a small number, in the hundends, (literaly around 400-500 cases) of people using false certificates for stuff like disabillity pensions which happened in a specific prefecture.
Most of those instances were about bending the law to cover some poor person with pension that didn't really qualify for, but couldn't get any other way (e.g. getting a "blind man disability pension" to some seeing old man who without that would have become homeless or be unable to pay for his healtcare). In cultures were such social help is valued above legality, this is something that happens, exploiting laws or holes in the law, etc.
Of course this bending is counted as "corruption" (the same way that turning a blind eye in a poor families use of electricity when they don't pay their power company bill would), but its impact is negligible and is mostly a way to short-circuit ineffective social care policies in small societies. For actual corruption we have far better (and more impactful) examples in the higher echelons.
It wasn't legal, but it wasn't a "get rich quick scheme" either -- and it was far from "widespread" nor was the loss "so great". If we're talking Amdahl's law this is insignificant as far as the debt is concerned - but being a nice example against Greek corruption in general, it was blown out of proportion and used as an representative example.
Don't believe the hype. The same way the right wing blows some non-representative cases of people getting welfare in the US out of proportion.
In any case, Ikaria, the island in TFA, is not one of those places.
To begin with, this is not a magic Lost/Avatar-kind of island!
I am Greek from another island and I can confirm that Icaria is a very interesting place.
However I think there are two aspects that are mistaken (even by me until recently). People are living a relaxed life but not a work free or "easy" life. They work hard and they live with less modern world amenities than most of us reading this article. The second (less important) is about the diet but this is a long discussion.
IMO what they do lack is everyday stress and pressure from people around them.
I also expect that there are other similar places around the world that I would like to meet.
Surely the diet plays an important role, but for me that is not so important as the reason above.
That said, it's a really good article, and now Icaria is in my places-to-visit-absolutely list.
You'd have to see the data beneath the surface: have all those old people lived on that island all their lives, or did they come from elsewhere to retire there?
How about islanders who move away and retire elsewhere, and who don't live that long? Is it because they moved away from the island of longevity? Or did they move away because it wasn't suitable for them to live (like that, for instance, they couldn't sustain the agricultural work due to health problems?)
Suppose someone moves away from the island at 75, because he or she requires care and there is nobody there (the kids and grandkids live elsewhere). Suppose that this person then dies half a year later, now a resident of another city or region. Will that death still be counted against the island so that it drags down its longevity average?
It grew quite large, then scabbed over and fell off. The skin healed up and he was cancer free.
Apparently it happens relatively often with some cancers.
- The lack of typical Western stress
- The physical activity of walking on the island
- The diet
Stress is the demon. If Ikarians don't face the typical Western job/money/schedule-associated stress (and I'm not saying they don't face other stress like family or social pressure), that's a huge advantage for them.
Physical activity also has been shown as a major differentiator. People who walk more than 7,000 steps daily have lower cardiovascular mortality (http://www.athleteinme.com/ArticleView.aspx?id=296). As a bonus, they are all getting enough Vitamin D from walking around in the sun.
I'm sure the diet helps, but it's probably a supporting factor.
Herbal teas, coffee and wine.
Goat's milk and honey.
Wild greens, beans, and olive oil.
Work in the fields, gathering it all.
A nap in the afternoon, and plenty of sex.
This is a recipe for a long life.
However, see this
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
Very clear evidence in a wide study about the contribution of genetics.
Food for thought is that the heritability of longevity as discovered in twin studies is actually not particularly high.
So what?
Best case, you get an extra decade or two of life. This may seem amazing, but to be honest, it's ineffectual life. This extra time will be spent being old. Whether you're 70 or 100, you will be frail, dim-witted[1], and unattractive. If you doubt this, consider that practically any old person would be willing to give up all of their material possessions to inhabit the body of a 20 year-old.
The real solution is not to extend natural human life by a fraction. The real solution is to make frailty and death voluntary. If this achievement seems ridiculous, remember how many technologies were once placed in the same category of improbability. To someone from a couple centuries ago, antibiotics would be witchcraft.
While I recognize that such disruptions would cause chaos and unrest, I also recognize that the current "solution" is far worse. In fact, it is reprehensible. On average, over 100,000 people die of aging every day. Whatever benefits aging may create, the costs are far worse. To put it concretely: imagine a Boxing Day tsunami happening every two days. That is what aging does to humanity right now. Imagine the sun flickering once a second. A human being dies more often than that. To accept this is obscene. It is is immoral. It is insane. And yet, most people do. Shame on us.
1. If you doubt that cognition declines as one ages, please read When does age-related cognitive decline begin? (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2683339/pdf/nihm...). If you aren't willing to read the paper, at least view the figures on pages 11 & 12.
Edit: I am amused by the replies speculating about my age. Even if I was young, how does that refute my arguments? At the risk of revealing my identity: I'm halfway through a typical human life. My values have shifted since I was young, but my disapproval of aging hasn't changed. Ever since I realized that people died through no fault of their own, I've been against it.
You sound like a 25 year old who thinks he is too important to die and that we should fix nature to enable endless life. Isn't that immoral or insane ? It will eventually happen and i would probably take the chance as well, but i am also aware that it is a very narcissistic thing to wish for.
Death, and worse, the frailty that currently comes with old age, should never be acceptable. Old age is a disease and we should use a lot of resources to try and find a cure.
I have seldom read such an amazing load of (sorry, to say it this way) bullshit and disdain of the old/being old.
I am in my thirties and I really am in awe the live, the doings, the stories of a lot of elders around me.
Sorry, but how young are you?
Getting older and eventually dying is imho, what defines our humanity. Granted, we have learned to extend live by a reasonably amount and have also, in a lot of cases, learned to lengthen it in a way, that gives people a lot of life-quality during their elder years.
In former times, being 40 to 50 meant you were frail, old, broken by hard work, and so on. Now, in most cases, that happens probably in your 70ies.
Anecdotal: Looking at my stepfather, who is helping us renovate our home and being 78, I wonder, how I will ever be able to do that much, when I am his age. Or my slightly younger stepmother.
By the way, he rides his bicycle for 4.500 miles every year, just for fun...
> If you doubt this, consider that practically any old person would be willing to give up all of their material possessions to inhabit the body of a 20 year-old.
Oh yeah, I really doubt this - I know a lot of older people and most of them would not want this trade in.
You are arguing from a very dangerous standpoint, as you argue, that cognitive decline makes live unworthy (and with that every old person). Thinking your argument through you arrive very fast at a point, where we have to get rid of older people, as their lives are "ineffectual life", I really feel only contempt for this race for efficiency, when it is used to divide people into categories like worthy/unworthy or lives in effectual/ineffectual.
Sorry, but I have to take a stand here, as your inhuman comment is the most upvoted here, standing on top. For me, that stains the whole of this community.
So now, let the downvotes beging. ;-)
Maybe, but is that a good thing?
To simply "expire out of existence" is a big issue for "humanity". It's the main reason why there's no proper answer to "what's the meaning of life" - whatever you do during your 50/70/120/.. years of life you'll eventually end up just as dead as the guy right next to you. Congratulations!
Being immortal would allow us to get rid of crutches like religion and allow us to implement proper moral systems, since there would be tangible rewards to being "good" simply for "goodness' sake", since being good and being selfish would be identical - if you'll (eventually but reiably) suffer overpoputlation, pollution and even unemployment just as much as the next guy, you'll (eventually but, again, reiably) think twice about elbow tactics.
> Oh yeah, I really doubt this - I know a lot of older people and most of them would not want this trade in.
20? Maybe. but How about being in the body of a 30- or 40-year old again? I can't imagine any 70-year olds not wanting to have a more "hassle-free" body, all other things being equal.
> makes live unworthy
Talking about live being "unworthy" is a slippery slope, but there nevertheless is an argument to be made about quality vs quantity of life .
I don't have the reference (and the exact numbers) at hand, but in "Happiness Hypothesis" (the Book) the author mentions a survey where people got to express their preference between "living x years of life and then dying to some tragic accident" and "x+y years of life, but y years spent in a wheelchair, because of some tragic accident". The results were rather mixed with the shorter life being more popular choice.
And, by the end of the day, a chance at higher-quality life in exchange for possibly less total life is also why things like armed robberies exist (even if not every robber things of it like that beforehand). I'd also argue the same is true of people opting for high-risk jobs, but there's also a sense-of-duty aspect to them, so it's not quite as clear-cut there.
Nobody is going to pay for your pension forever. Do you really want to spend your entire life working?
What? I don't know where you are from,but in EU state pensions are absolutely paid until death.
In this scenario our society would be split into two groups if we pay pensions for eternity:
Those who lived long enough to receive their pension. Their body turns 30 again thanks to breakthroughs in science. And those who never age beyond 30 and so they never get their pension.
The first group effectively gets "basic income" and they probably own houses/apartments so their living costs are quite low. You can either let everyone have pensions or get rid of pensions.
That perspective seems self-centred.
As long as he can still be a source of joy to people around him and makes the world a better place in his own way, I'd say it's a life worth living.
Being happy and alive for 20 years more instead of being dead does sound pretty good from an individual standpoint to me.
You're not thinking this through thoroughly.
Being "happy" can be achieved with anti-depressants and being "alive" can be achieved by essentially turning you into a vegetable.
You're happy and alive, yet I highly doubt this is what you had in mind when you wrote that line. You clearly want more than just being happy and alive. You also want to be free and an individual and have an impact on the world and all those other things humans want .. but sadly often times you can only have less and less of those as you grow old.
TFA states that most of the elderly still enjoy being part of a community and contributing to it, sharing their time and the food they grow. So in addition to being healthy and active, they have some kind of beneficial peer pressure to take part in the community. I doubt you'd get the same feeling of happiness and belonging by taking a daily dose of anti-depressants, but I have no experience with those. As for being alive, there's more to it than merely being not-dead :-)
I must admit I reacted mainly to the "ineffectual life" part of the comment which, to me, sounded like "they're not building a startup or trying to send people to Mars so it's useless", but there's a good chance I misinterpreted that part of the comment.
You have an extremely negative outlook on improving life expectancy ("So what?"? Really? Does life not matter at all to you?) in absence of pure immortality (a distinction I'm not even sure we'd be able to make in the ideal case), in such a way that I think any normal person would safely call bullshit on those being your preferences when it matters.
Currently death is inevitable and a law of nature. Perhaps technology will change this in the future. As it is, it's one of the those things one must accept and come to terms with.
Perhaps you are a bit too depressed about aging. There are documented cases of peoples in their 70:s being quite keen and healthy.
I think one the keys here is exercise. People who do daily walks are much more healthy than people who don't. If one is in their 70:s and has been sedentary for most of his life and the other one has kept even a routine of daily walks, the other one has decades of exercise behind him.
There has been studies that moderate exercise helps to revert supposedly age related cognitive discrepancies. Sorry, can't find the reference right now.
My belief (anecdotal and completely unfound) is that people who live healthy lives are much more healthier when old. Thus part of the incapacity attached to old age is not biological predestination but also affected through the current and past lifestyle of the old person.
Sure, one CAN be in a really bad shape in their 70:s. Just sit decades on a sofa watching TV. Or perform work that is physically exhausting.
I think you are overthinking and fearing too much a thing you do not know thoroughly. That you refer to a scientific paper is an indication of trying to rationally cope with this. However, there is one problem - Most bleeding edge scientific studies are flawed and incorrect. I would not consult a single paper to form an opinion on anything. I would consult a gerontologist. And even his opinion might be formed from studying partial population - the sick and in need of care - in stead of the whole population.
I refute this and so does the article. One of the striking things about this community was not only how many old people there were but how active they were. It mentioned 85 year olds who were still making honey and teaching dance. These people lived so much longer because they lived better and stayed active. Sure they will be less active, aware and attractive than when they were younger but these people are still in far better shape than most 'old' (60-70s) people in our society and many young people.
> The real solution is to make frailty and death voluntary.
> If this achievement seems ridiculous, remember how many
> technologies were once placed in the same category of improbability.
It is fashionable to show how sophisticated and intelligent you are, to discount or even deride people who have the goal of extending human lifespan. That's too bad.