16. Is life supposed to hurt?

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Hi friends,

Welcome to the sixteenth dispatch of How Humans Flourish, a research-informed newsletter on how humans thrive.

I’m often asked what research-informed means. It means this newsletter distills research and analysis based on science literature. Every month we dive deeply into a publication focused on human flourishing, with each week focused on a key insight from the text.

Human flourishing refers to the state or condition where individuals experience optimal well-being across the physical, mental, emotional, social, and even spiritual aspects of our lives. It implies not just the absence of suffering or illness, but the positive presence of five key attributes: physical and mental health, close social relationships, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and happiness and life satisfaction.

For the month of April, we’ve been reading “Blue Zones: 9 Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest” by bestselling author, longevity expert, and National Geographic Researcher Dan Buettner.  

Dan has traveled the planet to find the world’s oldest–100 years old and up–and healthiest people to learn if there are common elements in lifestyle, diet, and mindset that lead to an amazing quantity and quality of life. With the support of longevity scientists, his work has uncovered nine lessons:

1. Move naturally: be active without thinking about it.

2. Hara Hachi Bu: stop eating when you’re 80% full. 

3. Plant slant: avoid processed foods.

4. Grapes of life: drink red wine (in moderation).

5. Purpose now: take time to see the big picture.

6. Down shift: take time to relieve stress.

7. Belong: participate in a spiritual community.

8. Loved ones first: make family a priority.

9. Right tribe: be surrounded by those who share these similar values.

In previous newsletters, we’ve discussed 1, 2, 5, and 6, but 9 is perhaps the most quietly profound.

To summarize why, I think of my experience last week attending the Biomedical HIV Prevention Summit in Seattle. For three days officials from the White House, the Center for Disease Control, and the National Institutes of Health gathered alongside grassroots activists and Community Based Organizations to exchange knowledge around HIV research and prevention interventions.

Many viral diseases are contagious, meaning they are spread from one person to another. In the case of HIV, it was made clear– in order to prevent the transmission of HIV, an ecosystem of care must be maintained– from the proliferation of preventative education to equitable access to medication to encouraging safer sex practices.

During the conference, I heard the word community constantly. In fact, I heard it so much, I decided to count how many times I heard it in a day...over 328 times!

It was a simple, but profound contextualization: we do not get sick alone, therefore we cannot get well alone. 

In Blue Zones, Dan describes his theory of cultural evolution. After leading 17 expeditions focused on exploring indigenous practices and mysteries, he noticed, “that over time, customs and traditions of successful cultures seem to undergo an unconscious but intelligent natural selection: Practices not good for a society tended to disappear while beneficial ones often survived—no matter how counterintuitive they may seem.” He recalls “a story about a tribe in sub-Saharan Africa that cooked over open fires inside their huts. The huts filled with smoke that the villagers breathed. When a Peace Corps worker saw this he reasoned that the people’s lungs were blackening with smoke. He asked them why they cooked indoors. When no one had an answer for him, he convinced them to move their cooking fires outside. Soon the people started contracting malaria at an alarming rate. It turns out that the smoke kept malaria-carrying mosquitoes out of the huts. This outweighed the negative health effects of the smoke.” (Buettner, pg. 83)

I believe cultivating community is a form of intelligent natural selection. 

For example, when Dan interviews centenarians, they all describe an immense amount of economic hardship in their lives. In Okinawa, Japan one woman describes a harrowing early life.  ​​“We had famines, times when people starved to death. Even when times were good, all we ate was imo (sweet potato) for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” Many of us “scraped out a living by cultivating millet, rice, and barley, which were poorly suited for the island’s rocky soil. Though Okinawa’s warm, semi tropical climate provided for growing seasons, the half dozen annual typhoons that whipped through destroyed crops. The Okinawan farmer and his family worked ceaselessly to keep up, and often suffered chronic malnutrition. The five-year-old child helped weed the rice field. The grandmother tended the vegetable garden. The grandfather carried wood from the hills...” (Buettner, pg. 72-73)

What do humans do when life is full of strife? We cling to one another.

Okinawans participate in a “moai—which roughly means ‘meeting for a common purpose.’” Moais “originated as a means of a village’s financial support system. If someone needed capital to buy a parcel of land or take care of an emergency, the only way was to pool money locally. Today the idea has expanded to become more of a social support network, a ritualized vehicle for companionship.”  

They meet daily as an intentional ritual of friendship which is quite profound as, “​​chronic stress takes its toll on overall health,” and moais are “culturally ingrained mechanisms that shed it every afternoon at 3:30 p.m.” (Buettner, pg. 78-79)

Dan continues, “Professor Lisa Berkman of Harvard University has investigated social connectedness and longevity. In one study, she looked at the impact of marital status, ties with friends and relatives, club membership, and level of volunteerism on how well older people aged. Over a nine-year period, she found that those with the most social connectedness lived longer. Higher social connectedness led to greater longevity. Those with the least social connectedness were between two and three times more likely to die during the nine-year period of the study than those with the most social connectedness. The type of social connectedness was not important in relation to longevity—as long as there was connection. Even a lack of a spouse or significant other could be compensated for by other forms of connection.”

But the values of the support system matter, as well. “An article in the New England Journal of Medicine showed just how powerful an immediate social network can be. Looking at a community of 12,067 people over a period of 32 years, researchers found that subjects were more likely to become obese when their friends became obese. In the case of close mutual friends, if one became obese, the odds of the other becoming obese nearly tripled. It seemed the same effect occurred with weight loss.” (Buettner, pg. 190)

Psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author Esther Perel says it best: the quality of our lives depends on the quality of our relationships.

With gratitude,