The Island Where People Forget to Die

&gt; It’s easy to get enough rest if no one else wakes up early and the village goes dead during afternoon naptime. It helps that the cheapest, most accessible foods are also the most healthful — and that your ancestors have spent centuries developing ways to make them taste good. It’s hard to get through the day in Ikaria without walking up 20 hills. You’re not likely to ever feel the existential pain of not belonging or even the simple stress of arriving late. Your community makes sure you’ll always have something to eat, but peer pressure will get you to contribute something too. You’re going to grow a garden, because that’s what your parents did, and that’s what your neighbors are doing.<p>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&#x27;m tired. I live somewhere I can enjoy long walks and other fun exercise. I&#x27;m never late because I don&#x27;t set schedules.<p>&gt; 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.<p>This is the trouble with following a different lifestyle; almost every aspect of it conflicts with modern culture. Buying vegetables at a store, there&#x27;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&#x27;s the chips. Look at cat pics on the internet and there&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;ve succeeded is when living a more isolated lifestyle, somewhere remote. That leaves out cultural enjoyment and reinforcement.

I wonder about these longevity clusters and whether they aren&#x27;t just random. If you&#x27;ve read <i>The Drunkard&#x27;s Walk</i>, (which I highly recommend by the way) there&#x27;s a similar phenomenon with cancer clusters and the distribution of shells when the Germans were bombing London.<p>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&#x27;s in the water&#x2F;air that&#x27;s causing cancer? But if you distribute things completely at random, you end up with the same sort of clusters purely by chance.<p>So if everyone has a given percent chance of living to a certain age, and it&#x27;s randomly distributed throughout the world, you&#x27;d expect that there would be some clusters where groups of people living a long time show up by chance. It&#x27;s not quite that simple of course, because longevity isn&#x27;t independent from one person to the next. e.g. if everyone in your family lives a really long time, there&#x27;s a good chance you&#x27;ll live a really long time too. But I&#x27;d be curious to see if these clusters happen at a greater incidence than one would expect them to randomly occur or if there&#x27;s even some way to measure that.

As the side note says: &quot;The key to Ikarian longevity is not simply a healthful diet; daily socializing may be just as crucial.&quot; And taking a daily nap and drink vine.<p>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 &quot;alive&quot; 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.

This story has come up around here in the past (and I also left a comment at the time :P ).<p>To begin with, this is not a magic Lost&#x2F;Avatar-kind of island!<p>I am Greek from another island and I can confirm that Icaria is a very interesting place.<p>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 &quot;easy&quot; 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.<p>IMO what they do lack is everyday stress and pressure from people around them.<p>I also expect that there are other similar places around the world that I would like to meet.

Is it the island which causes longevity? Or is it that the island is only suitable for hardy, independent old people who are prone to achieving longevity?<p>You&#x27;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?<p>How about islanders who move away and retire elsewhere, and who don&#x27;t live that long? Is it because they moved away from the island of longevity? Or did they move away because it wasn&#x27;t suitable for them to live (like that, for instance, they couldn&#x27;t sustain the agricultural work due to health problems?)<p>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?

I don&#x27;t know if his story checks out, but I was intrigued by the idea of cancers going away on their own, as if they were a typical illness. It turns out, sometimes they do: <a href="http://bigthink.com/videos/can-cancer-cure-itself-4" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bigthink.com&#x2F;videos&#x2F;can-cancer-cure-itself-4</a> - and even weirder (to me), many cancers are self limited in nature and more harmful to treat than just leave in place: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/health/cancer-screening-may-be-more-popular-than-useful.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;10&#x2F;30&#x2F;health&#x2F;cancer-screening-ma...</a>

So this formula seems to boil down to:<p>- The lack of typical Western stress<p>- The physical activity of walking on the island<p>- The diet<p>Stress is the demon. If Ikarians don&#x27;t face the typical Western job&#x2F;money&#x2F;schedule-associated stress (and I&#x27;m not saying they don&#x27;t face other stress like family or social pressure), that&#x27;s a huge advantage for them.<p>Physical activity also has been shown as a major differentiator. People who walk more than 7,000 steps daily have lower cardiovascular mortality (<a href="http://www.athleteinme.com/ArticleView.aspx?id=296" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.athleteinme.com&#x2F;ArticleView.aspx?id=296</a>). As a bonus, they are all getting enough Vitamin D from walking around in the sun.<p>I&#x27;m sure the diet helps, but it&#x27;s probably a supporting factor.

Olives, hummus, and sourdough bread.<p>Herbal teas, coffee and wine.<p>Goat&#x27;s milk and honey.<p>Wild greens, beans, and olive oil.<p>Work in the fields, gathering it all.<p>A nap in the afternoon, and plenty of sex.<p>This is a recipe for a long life.

I want to become like Oscar Niemeyer when I get old. Niemeyer continued to create architecture even after he had passed the age of 100 years. Having his own office made it possible for him to work as much as he wanted. That&#x27;s how I see myself as an old man, still designing software in an office where I can work as much as I want to. Tending vineyard on a greek Island is not for me.

Previous discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4692598" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4692598</a>

The proliferation of co-working&#x2F;co-living spaces is a positive trend I&#x27;m seeing that could lead to longer, happier lives. I&#x27;m hoping to see communities like this pop up all over the world - instead of everyone growing their gardens and vineyards, we&#x27;ll be growing our startups or lifestyle businesses while being surrounded by a community of friends.

The article glosses over the contribution of genetics by providing just one vague counterexample.<p>However, see this<p><a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0029848" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.plos.org&#x2F;plosone&#x2F;article?id=10.1371&#x2F;journal....</a><p>Very clear evidence in a wide study about the contribution of genetics.

for me - the environment has a huge affect. utopia for me would be a distributed global community based in various exotic locations that are +50% self sufficient.. where everyone contributes to building social or eco progressive products, services, and biz models. with possibilities for virtual schooling ( for those w&#x2F;kids )

Missing a (2012) . I knew I recognized the title. Very interesting article though.

If you haven&#x27;t been to Icaria you cannot understand the article. It&#x27;s the calmness, the lack of anxiety, the clean air and a stressless way of life...

Usually, in cases where people claim great age, its because they&#x27;re using their parent&#x27;s or grandparent&#x27;s birth certificate.

Let&#x27;s assume every claim in this article is true. Let&#x27;s say that if you follow a certain diet, move to a certain island, make certain friends, and have certain genes, you will live to the age of 100.<p>So <i>what</i>?<p>Best case, you get an extra decade or two of life. This may seem amazing, but to be honest, it&#x27;s ineffectual life. This extra time will be spent being <i>old</i>. Whether you&#x27;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 <i>all</i> of their material possessions to inhabit the body of a 20 year-old.<p>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.<p>While I recognize that such disruptions would cause chaos and unrest, I also recognize that the current &quot;solution&quot; is far worse. In fact, it is reprehensible. On average, over 100,000 people die of aging <i>every day</i>. 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.<p>1. If you doubt that cognition declines as one ages, please read <i>When does age-related cognitive decline begin?</i> (<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2683339/pdf/nihms104392.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC2683339&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;nihm...</a>). If you aren&#x27;t willing to read the paper, at least view the figures on pages 11 &amp; 12.<p>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&#x27;m halfway through a typical human life. My values have shifted since I was young, but my disapproval of aging hasn&#x27;t changed. Ever since I realized that people died through no fault of their own, I&#x27;ve been against it.

Who knew that being on vacation your whole life can increase longevity.

Interesting story. Worth reading though