Death, Taxes, and Longevity
In her recently published New York Times interview with Hugh Grant, Sarah Lyall reveals that, in addition to his career and personal life, the two of them discussed “religion and death and politics and euthanasia and Sept. 11 and New York City and whether we believed in the afterlife.” Me, me, me, I whispered. What I’d give to have been in on that fascinating conversation!
After all, I’m pretty knowledgeable about New York City and 9/11, and I’ve dabbled for decades in politics and religion, especially the progressive varieties. I also adore Hugh Grant. But death?
Don’t get me wrong: I’m very interested in death. I actually plan to die of something one of these days—nothing prosaic like pneumonia or a stroke. I’d prefer something rare like Kuru, a fatal disease that makes you laugh uncontrollably due to a neurodegenerative reaction. You can prevent Kuru, though, by avoiding cannibalism. Hey, I can do that. So maybe something prosaic after all.
But if I start writing about death, I’m afraid I’ll lose some of the readers who have stuck with me for more than a year, what with my elegiac reminiscences, uplifting profiles, self-querying essays, and snarky posts at the mere mention of cutting Social Security.
Barbara Ehrenreich (RIP), once she turned 76, said she was ready to die anytime and stopped getting mammograms, blood tests, and even vaccinations. I can’t follow suit, Barbara, much as I admire your moxie. Most older adults hope to steer clear of the Grim Reaper for as long as possible. Best to die when you’re in good form rather than when you’re in the throes of a terminal disease, incontinent, and utterly dependent on others for your every need, right?
But are these our only choices? Remain fit and healthy until the last possible minute and drop dead at 100, or suffer an ignoble death in a nursing home a couple of decades earlier? Obviously, option number one wins that contest.
But longevity isn’t distributed equally. And there’s no pill for it.
I confess that I don’t follow the longevity news the way some do. From what I can tell, it’s all about pushing the upper limit of the human lifespan, an effort that’s being spearheaded by cell biologists, tech entrepreneurs, and experts in genetics, genomics, and proteomics. It’s also about how more and more of us can join the centenarian club.
Needless to say (but I’ll say it), where longevity is concerned, there’s a lot of money at stake. Anti-ageing products and regimens. Private research enterprises. Wellness and longevity gurus. Advice galore. No big surprise. It’s a matter of supply and demand. There’s lots of dubious supply to meet the demand created by the ageing of the population and our fear of death.
Have you heard about the “Blue Zones”?
It started out as research by National Geographic reporter Dan Buettner. Lately, though, the Blue Zones phenomenon has morphed into a protean creature with many offshoots, including one that actually made an impression on me: a Netflix series, filmed in the places Buettner identified as sites where an unusually large number of people were ageing in excellent health well into their 90s and even past 100.
Rather than contest the data or express some default version of skepticism, I’d like to speak to the mindset and the social dimension of ageing in these zones and why their way of life can’t be imported from rural or semi-rural premodern contexts and replicated in modern, individualistic, alienated, consumerist America.
Buettner points to the dietary practices that contribute to health and longevity in such Blue Zones as Okinawa, Japan; Ikaria, Greece; several villages in Sardinia; and the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica.
Next up is exercise as practiced in Blue Zones. Instead of gym workouts, running, or counting steps, it’s built into everyday life in the places he studied; gardening, for instance—not mainly for fun but to grow the vegetables families and communities need.
In Okinawa, people get up from their seated positions on the floor roughly 30 times a day. No comfy sofas or armchairs for them! And in Sardinia, the villages in question are located on steep hillsides, so their residents do their grocery shopping by walking all the way down to the market and back on a daily basis. Buettner experienced that upward climb first-hand and found it to be a far more vigorous workout than anything you’d be subjected to at the gym.
Even more persuasive, I felt, as I watched the series, was the degree to which the old seem to be integrated into family and social life in these locales. We may be able to import Japanese sweet potatoes and Greek herbal teas and Sardinian soup recipes, but the organic way the generations interact at home and in the community is hard to imagine in a society of individual consumers.
The late human rights activist Ward Morehouse used to say that Americans had traded their citizenship cards for credit cards. For large numbers of us, getting and spending trumps all else (no pun intended), and the main casualties have been empathy and solidarity with our fellow humans. At the same time, the system tends to frustrate the real, creative aspirations of actual individuals in this country.
Get to the point, MWC!
These are large themes—far larger than I’m in a position to address in a Substack post. Even so, I’d like to leave you with a few takeaways based on what I’ve just written.
Instead of obsessing about longevity and quick fixes to achieve it, wouldn’t it be better to think about building the kind of society in which older adults could thrive, along with everyone else?
How about dealing with the loneliness epidemic? Raising taxes on big corporations and very wealthy individuals to help fund intergenerational, community-based programs and resources?
How about making America solidaristic again via a New Deal for our time? Putting the social and community dimension of healthy ageing front and center rather than rewarding the entrepreneurs offering the next anti-ageing pill, product, or research project? And, finally, how about providing incentives other than profit to motivate the above?
Food for thought, I hope. And why not try Japanese sweet potatoes while we’re at it? Couldn’t hurt!