“At ninety if the ancestors invite you into heaven, ask them to wait until you are one hundred… and then you might consider it” -anonymous
What allows some people to live to an old age, and others to die earlier? All things being equal (which they aren’t), we all would love to live a long and fruitful life. Barring bad genetics, how does someone maximize his or her chances of living and becoming a centenarian? Recent studies as detailed in November issue of National Geographic and other sources like the Okinawa Centenarian Study, try to lend some light to the darkness.
First though you have to go where there are a lot of centenarians. In most industrialized countries only about 10 people per 100,000 live to be 100 or more. However, in Okinawa, the number is closer to 34 per 100,000. That’s 340% more people living to that age. Take note that they also have the highest fertility rate in Japan with a positive population growth. This means two things. The Okinawa centenarians are living long healthier better quality lives, and unlike their western counterparts they are also having enough children to increase the population. The rest of the industrialized world has had plummeting birth rates.
Okinawa has the oldest life expectancy in the world. The men live to an average age of 78 and women to 86. Not only that, but just like in America, the Okinawa women live longer than their male partners. Not only are the centenarians doing better, but also the average Okinawan who follows the same lifestyle lives closer to the maximum human lifespan than other populations.
What are the common threads that can be found among the oldest living peoples? According to the November issue of National Geographic, there are five things that are common threads. They are (in no particular order); drinking wine, eating in moderation, not smoking, religious faith, and strong family ties. The other key thing they found was “having a clear division of labor between a man and a wife so that stress was equally shared”.
For me, the most interesting of these are the strong family ties and the clear divisions of labor as a solid foundation. Unlike the west the Okinawa people live a more traditional family lifestyle with its traditional roles. Their families are patriarchal and the clear divisions generally fall under more traditional lines than in the west. Adding confirmation to the fact that lifestyle is a major part of it, those Okinawans who grow up in other countries and/or abandon these lifestyle patterns suffer from the ills we do.
There are lots of nice things to be said about Okinawans health. They live longer than we do; they suffer lower prostate cancer rates, lower dementia (meaning that these old people have a better quality of life all the way to their 90’s), and lower breast cancer rates. They are younger physiologically than similarly aged Americans, and according to the study, there are virtually no women in Okinawa using estrogen replacement therapy.
“They experience menopause naturally and non-pharmacologically with fewer complications such as hot flashes, hip fractures, or coronary heart disease.”
How are they mentally? Well the Okinawa study points out that:
…centenarians, when in their prime of life, scored low when it came to feelings of “time urgency” and “tension” and high in “self-confidence” and “unyieldingness.” Interviews revealed optimistic attitudes, adaptability, and an easy-going approach to life. Moderation was found to be a key cultural value. Strong social integration and a deep spirituality were particularly evident among older women
Patriarchy has a stronger social integration compared to today’s western neo family structures. The types of benefits mentioned above are rarely attainable in other family constructs. Without the efficient and favored productivity, time suffers, and social structures remain loose. From this community of family and friends they have a social purpose and links to other people in their community. Most belong to a moai, a kind of social support network in which the people meet regularly and commune several times a week. This network, enjoyed over tea, provides social, financial, and emotional support. Being part of all this gives the majority something referred to as Ikigai, “that which makes one’s life worth meaning”. In other words under a traditional family they have purpose, something that people in the west search for often in silly ways. They also work to an older age tending to their lives and being active. In every way they are younger while being older.
However the Okinawa people are not the only ones that live long in the world. Close to the Gennargentu Mountains in Sardinia, the number of people living beyond 100 years is twice the average rate for the rest of Italy.
Like their cousins in Japan, they too work hard and have stayed active at older ages than other societies. Once again the same threads converged, family ties being much stronger, and labor divisions more traditional. Strong families insure that good rules for living are learned and passed on. Contrast this with families in the west where these benefits are now pretty rare compared to its past. Few people of this region of Italy put their parents in retirement homes. To them it would be an insult and would bring dishonor.
The interesting point is the ratio of long lived people and their mates. In most countries the ratio of women to men over 100 is four to one. In general the men die off. Though this ratio is not the same in Sardinia, there it’s close to one to one.
In studying the centenarians, the researchers were able to explain this as attributed to a strict sexual division of labor. Women managed finances and the home, while the men were the breadwinners and were in charge.
Why would such an arrangement in family structure around traditional lines, accepted as an oppressive life by many western feminists, lead to a maximization of genetic potential? Perhaps such things are not as oppressive in practice as they may seem in theory when your main focus is on pathological families as if they were the norm. Perhaps spoons are most happy when doing spoon things and forks are most happy doing fork things.
Ever try to eat soup with a fork? You can do it, but it’s not productive. When families divide labor without regard to who does it better, they suffer from a serious handicap in functional ability. When each person in a family does what they do best, they can maximize what the family is capable of achieving and receiving. They are more successful in every way.
The researchers believed that such an arrangement reduces stress faced by the male. Stress kills, and stress is a major form of familial discord. It interferes with his ability to provide on all levels. Reducing the stress, means they both live longer. He lives longer and can provide and work longer; this allows her to also have less stress too (and pregnancies are better with less stress). If you love your mate then you get stressed when they get stressed. In the west we have all these neo families that don’t optimize these things, either in structure or in practice (and we suffer high mortality, high stress, low productivity, high divorce, morbidity, poor mental health, high interaction problems and more). We feel it’s normal that both people in a relationship are stressed and we are constantly in search of ways of reducing it. Obviously the oppressed Okinawa women think differently. Perhaps the answer is not to let the stress get that high in the first place.
Not only do the people that live like this live long, they also enjoy the longest health expectancy. Over and over under every rock you find pluses on pluses. Great health expectancy means lower health costs, better participation with children (they don’t put the elderly in a home so they are there for the children of the young, not children of the middle aged). Their division of labor optimizes their productivity. Health problems aren’t the same drain they are in the west. In tough times there are other family members to help (everyone isn’t tapped out through squandering their personal resources).
The family is also what teaches them to live like this and maintain the life attitudes and positive customs. Feminist tweaking of the social structure (without knowledge of how everything fits together, works, and why), cant provide these advantages. The government can’t provide these advantages. The best the government can do is inform then enforce expensively and destructively. Traditional family can enforce without great expense and constructively with understanding and compassion that is only possible by living up close and being a part of the person’s life.
Traditional familial efficiency gives them time to be with each other, and learn. The old have time to teach the young and to be a part of the lives of the young. In the west we have our kids when we are too old for the majority of older people to be a positive influence in the children’s lives, and pass down history and wisdom. In traditional families the children are safer, they are mentally healthier, and grow up to be better people. More generations live together and have all the social and economic positives that also come with such an arrangement. .
Its been shown in the study that the younger people who followed the west and left this familial structure suffer the ills that we have in the west. Compared to what we could have (we are often sick in our luxury, sometimes to the point where we brag about it), what we actually have pales. The main reason for this is that neo family structures carry little learning forward any more. They find customs, traditions, and good rearing to be things they don’t know how to teach, don’t have the time to teach, think they are not important, or are just oppressively restrictive.
We can no longer look to our parents to teach us what our grandparents knew and would teach us. Which was to eat right and moderately, not to smoke, work hard to fulfill your roles in life, honor your family, practice your faith, stay close to friends, share the wealth, help each other, and live long healthy happy active lives.