I always find these stories to be endlessly fascinating. And make no mistake, they are living the good life.
Reader Interactions
51Comments
Comments are closed.
by John Cole| 51 Comments
This post is in: Excellent Links
I always find these stories to be endlessly fascinating. And make no mistake, they are living the good life.
Comments are closed.
Kristin
Read that yesterday and it was fascinating. While I don’t think I could accommodate the sleeping at late as needed or naps I was definitely drawn to the wine and extremely healthy diet! Meat five times a month! Incredible story.
syphonblue
Move to an island, get cured of cancer.
Have people looked for any smoke monsters, or giant Egyptian statues?
Elizabelle
How many “it’s because they don’t have woodchippers!” comments will this post draw?
Meh.
Nothing we can learn from Greece. Mediterranean-diet eating wastrels.
ETA: And tax dodgers. We in the United States are. just. like. Greece. It’s why we can’t have nice things.
rlrr
“They’re not Americans, therefore their quality of life obviously sucks.”
— Fox “News”
SatanicPanic
Greece is the best country in the world. Everytime someone complains “we’re becoming Greece” I’m like, why not?
shortstop
The mediterranean diet is exceptionally healthy and, just as important, super satisfying.
hitchhiker
I was pimping that story on fb yesterday — love it. Naps, food, gardens, wine, neighbors, friends. SO RIGHT.
gelfling545
Even if you didn’t live to be 100 it would still be damn fine.
muddy
I think the waking up naturally counts for a lot. I am glad that I can wake up when I wake up and still do my work, I know that when I have to wake with an alarm I feel disjointed half the day, even if it is not particularly early.
Enhanced Mooching Techniques
Isolated island population, could just as easily be genetics as anything else. My dad’s family typically lives to their ’90s.
Keith
@rlrr: Alternate Fox headline, “Drunk Communist Cheats Death”
chopper
good wine, fresh seasonal food and most of all community.
Elizabelle
40% unemployment, but a strong sense of community and purpose.
NYTimes article a few weeks back about the threat of robotics displacing workers. What then?
We may need to learn some lessons from Ikaria. Among them being content with less, and thus richer.
the Conster
The unprocessed plant diet is necessary but not sufficient. The quality sleep described in tandem with the diet makes it sufficient. There’s so much restorative power in deep undisturbed restful sleep, but hey, there’s no money to be made by telling people to turn everything off and let your body guide you.
pseudonymous in nc
Isolated island population, could just as easily be genetics as anything else.
Could be, but the suggestion is that expats and emigres don’t get the benefits. My one quibble was that it seemed focused on ages 60-100, with people who had the basic infrastructure of life sorted out: somewhere to live, a minimal amount of work, a close-knit social structure.
But the implication is that good health and long life is not something you can bottle and sell in an infomercial, or even hand out for free. It’s a matter of living without giving too much of a fuck — or, as my granddad put it, not worrying about the things you haven’t got. Much easier said than done.
Schlemizel
I don’t know, I think I would just die if I were seen in public dressed like that:)
Either that or my kids would kill me
Just Some Fuckhead
Three pages in and it was clear to me that the elderly residents of Ikaria are vampires.
MomSense
Damn now everyone will know. This has been my escape plan for some time now.
Reklam
But they aren’t working 3000 hours a year spinning like a hamster on a wheel so that Mitt Romney can have a car elevator/horse in the Olympics and Donald Trump can have a classy gold gilded bidet.
Hence, losers. Probably don’t even have retina display on their computers for cryin’ out loud!
Anoniminous
Spontaneous remission is a known fact. Nobody studies it scientifically. Nobody funds it. There’s no money in it. Without clinical studies anything anyone says is no more than pseudo-scientific drivel.
Which is too bad. A lot could, but won’t, be learned.
becca
@Elizabelle: tis a gift to be simple, tis is a gift to be free, tis a gift to be just how we ought to be…
JPL
@becca: We’d have to plant olive trees and grape vines to enjoy their good life.
General Stuck
A Drunkard’s Dream If I Ever Did See One
Culture of Truth
rich in olive oil and vegetables, low in dairy (except goat’s milk) and meat products, and also included moderate amounts of alcohol. It emphasized homegrown potatoes, beans (garbanzo, black-eyed peas and lentils), wild greens and locally produced goat milk and honey.
Didn’t we kind of know this already?
Don’t get me wrong, I find it fascinating too.
LGRooney
@Elizabelle: I’ve often told my wife that if we ever find ourselves economically insufficient here, we’ll go back to her native Ukraine or Montenegro where I lived when we met.
The tremendous sense of community is amazing and no matter how poor you are in terms of steady income, you’re never really poor because they take care of each other. Better to be poor there than marginal here.
I think the other two key takeaways are the walking everywhere and the eating of minimal amounts of meat. Not vegetarian but much smaller portions of meat than we’re used to – of course, that would never hold for Montenegrins at meal time but snacking is never anything processed.
gelfling545
@muddy: I have been able wake naturally maybe 5 days out of every seven since I retired (from my “real” job) regardless of what I have to do at my “retirement jobs”. It has made life sooooo much better. LLBean has an alarm clock that gradually raises the light level in the room. I am thinking about trying it for those few days when I need to be sure I’m awake by a certain time.
LGRooney
@Reklam: My first thought was, “Yeah, but when do they blog and about what?”
Culture of Truth
Even if you didn’t live to be 100 it would still be damn fine
That’s the thing – who wants to live long if all you’re going to do is nap and and drink and hang out with friends and have fresh bread and olive oil and… hold on…
Less Popular Tim
Ha ha, Stamatis Moraitis probably only get iPod mini. Everybody know it’s for girls!
Culture of Truth
Humans were meant to be woken by cats.
I have that on good authority.
Culture of Truth
“Do you have windows 8?”
“we have windows 4. two in living room and 2 in kitchen.”
Bubblegum Tate
ZOMG SOSHULISTS!
muddy
@gelfling545: Yeah, it really sets the tone for the whole day. In the summer I wake later because there is a huge tree outside that window, it’s brighter in the winter. But summer is when you want to be up early and do outdoor work before the heat. The light thing might be good to try.
Tone In DC
@Culture of Truth:
LULz.
All hail Tunch (all your watches and clocks are belong to CATS).
Henry Bayer
Where to live longer? Find an unexplained cancer cluster and move there. Statistics “revert to the mean”
Democrat Partisan Asshole
How about that? A bunch of people not driving fifty miles a day to work in a hellhole for another ten hours a day, eating (literal) shit morning, noon, and night, and then not coming home to sit on a couch by themselves until they fall asleep with a fistful of Ambien live longer.
Hoocouldanoed?
Christ, the problems with our society and the things that are killing us are so fucking obvious, but we refuse to acknowledge any of them. You can consider this article a clue-by-four across the forehead telling us what we’re doing wrong.
khead
There’s no way I could do their diet. I like meat too much.
But the wake up naturally and go to bed when you want part? I’m all for that. I’ve been living it for a few years.
Culture of Truth
You need Siri to remind you of these things
Democrat Partisan Asshole
Oh great Mr. Cole, I have accidentally typed a forbidden word. Please free me from the dungeon.
Democrat Partisan Asshole
@gelfling545: My wife has this device as she, to put it really nicely, does not wake up well. Bad biorhythm. Her natural inclination would be to go to sleep around 4am and wake up about noon. She is, of course, a teacher, so not only is that not happening, but her entire adult life has been one of sleep deprivation and misery.
It wakes me up just fine, her, not so much.
EconWatcher
I may be pelted with rotten tomatoes for saying this, but that lifestyle sounds very boring.
Democrat Partisan Asshole
How about that? A bunch of people not driving fifty miles a day to work in a hellhole for another ten hours a day, eating (literal) shit morning, noon, and night, and then not coming home to sit on a couch by themselves until they fall asleep with a fistful of sleeping pills live longer.
Hoocouldanoed?
Christ, the problems with our society and the things that are killing us are so fucking obvious, but we refuse to acknowledge any of them. You can consider this article a clue-by-four across the forehead telling us what we’re doing wrong.
Southern Beale
Umm, I think John missed a key piece of information buried in the heart of the story:
Ah-hah!
:-)
Lurking Canadian
@Culture of Truth: I think it was George Burns who said “My doctor tells me that if I quit drinking and quit smoking and quit eating red meat, I could live to be 100. If you call that living”
muddy
@Lurking Canadian: My dad used to say about things like that, “Does it really make you live longer, or does it just feel that way?”
Maude
If John were there, he’s last ten minutes. He’d be tweeting, get me out of here.
Reklam
@Democrat Partisan Asshole: “What if I told you insane was working fifty hours a week in some office for fifty years at the end of which they tell you to piss off; ending up in some retirement village hoping to die before suffering the indignity of trying to make it to the toilet on time? Wouldn’t you consider that to be insane? ”
And nowadays our Galtian Overloads don’t even think we are entitled to the retirement village part. Work till you drop. What a Grand Bargain!
Yutsano
@Lurking Canadian: And, incidentally, he lived until 100. The real lesson: doctors don’t know boo about how long you’re gonna live.
J R in WV
I retired in 2008, on 12/31, from a government job.
If the government pension lasts, and social security lasts, we’ll be OK. Sleeping until we wake up works well.
Naps some afternoons works well, although I was never a napper before. I think all these things in the article work for me. We already do the best olive oil available, and cheeses, I confess some ice scream…
Doing OK…
Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.)
Stuff like this really hits a chord with me. One of the reasons I want to go back and live in Honduras so much is that living in a small town there is so communal. A bunch of us deadbeat 47% loser teachers making $100 a month lived in a big house together. We ate together, cooked together, and on the weekends, we drank beer together. The other teachers, both Ameican and Honduran, were always over at the house, too, to eat or maybe only to hang around and talk.
We cooked most of our food ourselves, and we’d go down to the town market once or twice a week and load up on vegetables that came from the farms outside town. We’d make vegetable soup or spaghetti sauce or guacamole, one of those, at least once a week, and we’d all live on it for days. We didn’t eat much meat, because we never cooked meat at home; it was too messy and too much of a hassle. When we were in the mood for meat, a bunch of us would go out for a meal downtown together. Once a month or so, we’d have six or eight of the high school kids over and we’d all make pizza together from scratch–the dough, too.
People there don’t worry much about time, either. Being late isn’t a big deal. And falling to sleep to the sound of the Caribbean Sea lapping against the beach every night isn’t too bad for your well being, either.
But I guess the thing that really stands out for me, still, today, is the feeling of belonging. We all belonged. We gringoes were as much a part of the town as the Teleños. They welcomed us, they made sure we knoew we were welcome, and that we were part of their society.
It really is my fondest hope to go back and live there. I think the two years I lived there were really the two years in my life that I most felt like I belonged. I felt like that was where I was meant to be. It sounds like that Greek island is like that, too. You know, the U.S. is great. But I’ve always somehow felt like I was an outsider in my own country, though I didn’t truly get that until I lived in Honduras. I still love this country, and I want to see it thrive, but I’d rather live in Tela. I wish we here could–or would–learn a little from the people in places like Tela or Ikaria. They could teach us a lot.
Elizabelle
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.):
Really interesting experience and comment.