Good Life Project - Want to Live Longer? It’s a People Thing

Episode Date: March 30, 2017

In the last month, two annual reports have come out that offer guidance on who the happiest and healthiest countries in the world are. They rank each in order. And, the results tend to be fairly consistent year-over-year. The nordic countries generally report being the happiest. The United States is somewhere in the middle. Similar […]The post Want to Live Longer? It’s a People Thing appeared first on Good LifeProject. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today's episode is brought to you by Camp GLP. It's an amazing opportunity to come hang out with me, with our awesome Good Life Project team, a lineup of inspiring teachers from art to life to work, and a community of almost impossibly friendly grown-up campers from literally all over the world as we take over a beautiful summer camp for three and a half days of workshops and activities that fill your noggin with ideas and strategies for life and create the type of friendships and stories

you thought you'd pretty much left behind decades ago. It's all happening at the end of August, just about 90 minutes from New York City, and more than half the spots are already gone. So be sure to grab your spot quickly. You can learn more at goodlifeproject.com slash camp, or just go ahead and click the link in the show notes. On to our show. Hey, it's Jonathan with this week's Good Life Project riff, short and sweet, hopefully. So there's something kind of interesting on my mind this week. Well, at least interesting to me and hopefully interesting

to you. I do a lot of reading. I do a ton of research in a lot of different fields, all connected in some way, shape or form to this bigger question. What does it mean to live a good life? And I stumbled upon two recent reports that have been out over the last week or so. One is about the healthiest people in the world rated by country. And the other was about the happiest people in the world rated by country. What was interesting was at the top of the healthiest, and they kind of measured that by those most likely where if you were born today, you're very likely to live into your 80s, was Italy, which is interesting because when you look at Italy, it's a country where there's a lot of, there are problems with government,

there are problems with the economy. And you would think that that would lead to a lot of stress in life. They eat a lot of foods that in the US are starting to become labeled, you know, pariahs. And yet they are viewed as among the healthiest people in the world and the longest lived people in the world. And you got to kind of scratch your head and say, huh, what's going on here? At the same time, this other report on the happiest folks in the world came out. Sitting right at the top were not European and American countries.

It was the Nordic countries, basically in the top five. And the US, I think, was way down in the middle of that list. And what was interesting, too, is that Italy was not all that close to the top of the list also, in terms of happiest countries. So again, it left me kind of scratching my head and saying, what's really going on here? And what are the commonalities? You know, if you could look at the two different studies and look at all these different countries, what are the things that seem to be really determinative? You know, diet, lifestyle, all a lot of research on the, quote, Mediterranean diet and how, you know, a lot of people claim that it's incredibly heart healthy, even though it includes things like pasta and carbohydrates and gluten.

And then there's all this research and people who are saying, well, yes. And at the same time, portion sizes of those used are much different, and they're always complemented with very healthy doses of vegetables, fruit, and, of course, lots and lots of olive oil. And that makes it much healthier for you and heart healthier. There's something else that I think is going on there, tooiest and happiest have really high levels of social support and social interaction. And they also have high levels of, to a certain extent, personal freedom. And when you look across a lot of countries where they have longevity and happiness and life satisfaction, what you see pretty a committed community of like minded people where you feel safe, you feel a sense of belonging, you feel a sense of friendship and camaraderie. You feel on some level that your needs for the four levels of love, right, romantic love, companionate love or friendship, compassionate love and attachment are being satisfied in deep and meaningful ways. And that this bigger context of belonging, that you found your people,

they get you and you get them, and you spend time with them, that that is satisfied. And when you start to look at the countries where people are really flourishing on a personal level, what you see is extraordinary levels of human socialization and contact and friendship and love and community and belonging. And when you start to look at countries where we're, you know, quote, on the leading edge of technology and health and nutrition and movement, yet we're not ranked. Our rankings are falling in these scales of health and happiness. What you also see is a disenfranchisement of humanity. You see a loosening of social connection. You see a lessening of the sense of belonging and an increase in the experience of isolation. You see a larger social context where the places that people used to turn to to find community are either no longer

providing it or they just don't exist anymore. Robert Putnam wrote about this years back in his book Bowling Alone. I've written about this fairly extensively in blog posts and also in my last book, How to Live a Good Life. We discount the role of community and belonging and it is mission critical. And when you look at the cultures where people are really flourishing, these needs, these social needs

are elevated to a really high level. And it really is making me think. It's making me think about the way that we're living our lives. It's making me think that we will go out of our way to change all the external things that we put into our body and the way we move our body. And those are important. And yet at the same time, if we do not also elevate the fierce biological and psychological need for belonging, friendship, and love, and really lean into exploring those, and not just exploring them and saying, well, yeah, they matter, but actually going out and doing the work to be present more with friends. If you don't have friends, to do the work to find friends and community where you really

feel like they get you and you get them and you can drop the facade and be you and be held, be seen, be embraced and be loved. We don't elevate that to the level of being sacred anymore. And when you look at the cultures that are really flourishing in this world, it's not necessarily that they are on the leading or bleeding edge of technology or science or commerce. It's that they embrace people. They embrace the role of deep and meaningful relationships and build life around the ability to spend time building those relationships, being in those relationships.

The longest running study on human flourishing, the Harvard study for men, also known often as the Grant study, looked at, I believe it was over a period of seven or eight decades, a mass data set of a whole bunch of people who had been to Harvard and graduated and then also others trying to figure out, okay, what makes for a good life? And in the end, George Valiant, one of the curators of this project over a long amount of time, you know, was asked, well, what is the single most determinant variable in a life well-lived looking at this data? And his answer was love. Love. it's time to elevate that as a metric. Not necessarily just romantic love, but companionate love, friendship love, belonging. Maybe it's time to get back to being with others who want to be with us. That's what I'm thinking about today's Good Life Project. When was the last time that you spent real meaningful time with folks who you cannot get enough of? If you can't remember, if it hasn't been in the last week, maybe it's time to do something about it. As always, this is just what's on my mind this week. I hope you found it valuable. And make this the beginning of a conversation.

Don't let it stop here. Share this with somebody who you think would really benefit from this idea and then talk to them about it. Make it a conversation because that's where real change begins. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. Thank you.