“The following series is designed to entertain and inform, not to provide medical or health advice,” says my television. Ha ha! You can’t tell me what to do, Netflix. Except, in a way, you can tell me what I do, because I take all of your shows as medical advice: Goop, The Ultimatum, Paw Patrol, Gilmore Girls, The Lincoln Lawyer, Beef (yum!). I pay for my subscription with VHI.
In Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones, awestruck writer Dan Buettner goes around the world visiting “blue zones” where people live unusually long lives. He wanders about stalking centenarians who have the strength and vitality of people in their 50s, then compiles a list of things he learns in each place. Each lesson pops up on the screen as part of a funky graphic.
If, for example, Buettner turned up at my door to be delighted and inspired by how I live my life, “Take Netflix shows as medical advice” is the first lesson I’d give him. “Do I not also have the vitality and strength of a person in their 50s?” I’d say, bouncing proudly on my armchair.
“Yes, but you’re in your 40s,” Buettner would say, and I’d take against him, striking him from my will. (Since writing “and my terrible nephews get NOTHING” in my will, I put television personalities there instead.) The words “Hold Grudges” would pop up on the screen, because that’s my other secret of surviving until 48.
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“You really have a lot of spite in your heart,” Buettner would then say with wonder, and I wouldn’t respond, because I’m not talking to him.
Nonetheless, I’d continue to allow him to observe my ways, for the good of humanity. “I can’t help but notice that you’ve been sitting there glaring at me for hours. Is this another of your rules for life?”
“Yes, it is!” I will say with joy, for my next rule is: “Resist getting wear and tear on your limbs.”
“I thought you weren’t talking to me,” says Buettner. Rule 4, “Don’t stick to your plans”, pops up on the screen.
I can’t speak at this point because I have a sandwich stuffed in my mouth – “All-sandwich diet” pops up on the screen. I wordlessly thrust some blueprints into Buettner’s hands. They feature a drawing of my head attached to R2D2′s body. The words “Have head transplanted on to a robot, hopefully R2D2″ pop up on screen.
American culture is filled with billionaires eating nothing but kale, getting blood transfusions from the young and trying to upload their sickening brains to the internet (see: Twitter)
Buettner and his camera crew are now backing out of the door. “Your home is not a blue zone!” he says. “It’s a sickly-green-coloured zone.”
“Stay here and be delighted with me, Dan Buettner!” I cry, but then I feel sleepy and take a nap.
It’s not surprising that a Netflix show about an American trying to cheat death is popular. The culture is filled with US billionaires eating nothing but kale, getting blood transfusions from the young and trying to upload their sickening brains to the internet (see: Twitter). You can tell Buettner is American by the way he discusses life and death as though it’s a transaction. “Most of us,” he says, “are leaving good years on the table.”
He talks about how a third of Americans die prematurely and how American life expectancy is dropping. Then, in the first episode, he visits countries with sane food-safety regulations, free healthcare, gun control and functional social-welfare programmes, and comes to the conclusion that the longevity he sees there has something to do with diet and moderate exercise.
Look, his interviewees are good company, and this is often an engaging, beautifully filmed travelogue that reinforces the importance of living an active, purposeful life. It’s just also kind of daftly apolitical. In the first episode he goes to Okinawa, in Japan, where old folk eat well, engage in frequent moderate activity and have meaningful social interactions, before going to a village in Sardinia where old people eat well, engage in frequent moderate activity and have meaningful social interactions. This blows his mind.
He’s unconcerned with the secrets of a short life: small government, the corporate capture of regulators, inadequate healthcare systems and the absence of a safety net
In fairness, the areas he visits do have particularly long-lived residents. (The village he visits in Sardinia has 10 times the number of centenarians you’d find in a similar US population.) At various times he suggests that the secrets to a long life might include a particular strain of sweet potato, not having chairs, vegetarianism, living on hills, religious faith and, frequently, the unpaid care work of women (though he kind of glosses over that). He’s unconcerned with the secrets of a short life: small government, the corporate capture of regulators, inadequate healthcare systems and the absence of a safety net.
He does explore some specific public-health measures in later episodes. He also reveals that he was once given a small American city, in Minneapolis, to fix (giving an eccentric stranger a city to experiment on instead of fixing the social contract is classic America), where he attempted to create his own “blue zone”, and did un-American things such as encouraging walking and building bike lanes.
But his main inspiration is Singapore, where health has apparently been improved with public-private partnerships, libertarian health “nudges”, proximity-housing grants (so people can look after their parents) and private home ownership. He means well, but his counterintuitive radical thinking seems to have brought him all the way to Fine Gael. I’m unconvinced that huge cultural change can be created with teensy policy tweaks. But somehow the type of old-fashioned public-health measures that transformed life expectancy last century just aren’t quite as sexy as achieving immortality with this one neat trick.
Speaking of immortals, Marty Morrissey is also out and about this week on Marty’s Big Picture Show (Sunday, RTÉ One), where he travels from town to town like Michael Landon, the earthbound angel in Highway to Heaven. His companion is the similarly engaging historian Liz Gillis, and they’re exploring the power of photography to depict social change. In the first episode they speak to Gerry Andrews, who has cancer and is in danger of losing his sight, about the starkly beautiful photographs he took of Limerick in the 1970s. Then they go and track down the subjects of the photographs.
The interviews are filled with idiosyncratic details and deeply moving moments. Three ragged children, now impressive middle-aged women, were begging before Andrews took their portraits. “We had no one to run to, no one to care for us,” says one of them. Three top-hat-wearing Thin Lizzy fans, now older men, tell Marty how the hats were being thrown out by an undertaker when they requisitioned them and then they instantly start ribbing one another about their relative good looks. The show is a tribute not only to the work of unsung photographers but also to resilience and kindness. And Marty Morrissey is really good at this stuff. If Dan Buettner ever visits a “blue zone” like Clare, I’m guessing “Marty Morrissey” might be one of the things that pop up on that screen.
