The Blue Zones happiness agenda

 Inspired by Sneh's report, I'm watching the Blue Zones documentary. "Enjoy the present. That's important," says one Okinawan. "Don't get angry," says another. And "make people happy."

So it's not just about longevity, and living longer. It's about living better. Happier...

 

Lessons from Denmark

"7. Take your time in school. Danes don't start school until age six and often don't end their academic careers until they're 30. Along the way, they may travel, take a year off to try a profession, and switch majors. By the time they graduate, they're likely to have found a career that they love, not just one that pays. They've had a variety of life experiences and a rich liberal arts education. Indeed, among the happiest Danes are those in their late 20s and early 30s who are in the marriage market and transitioning from school to their first job.

Lessons: Go to a school you can afford, take liberal arts classes, take a year off to travel before graduating. Don't rush into a job, mortgage, and debt.

8. Take six weeks of vacation. The Danes take at least four weeks a year to travel and often take two months. They'll summer in southern Europe or spend weeks at a time at the sea. A researcher in the Danish statistics office told me that the more Danes vacation, the more value they gain. After six weeks of vacation, they actually feel more satisfied to get back to work and become productive again.

Lessons: Don't be lured by the notion that you'll take your dream vacation later in life. Use all your vacation time and negotiate for more until you're getting about six weeks off. No one on her deathbed wishes she had worked more.

9. Consider cohousing. Denmark is home to more than 100 cohousing projects, or bofaellesskap. In each case, about 30 families live in connected homes that form a long row or a circle around a common area. As a rule, you can walk into any house and announce yourself. Usually you are greeted by friends, but if no one answers, you don't stay. Kids are completely free-range—they end up at each other's houses and roam the grounds and surrounding woods freely. The cohousing arrangement strikes the perfect balance between private and public, as residents can be as social as they want, although circumstances nudge them into a minimum threshold of socialization. (Even introverts are happier, studies have shown, when they're around people rather than alone.)

Lessons: Make a point of moving into a friendly neighborhood with people who share your stage in life. Get to know your neighbors, organize a potluck, help start a communal garden. If you have children, make a deal with other parents to take turns taking care of each other's kids. If you're interested in finding cohousing in the United States, investigate the Cohousing Association (cohousing.org)."

— The Blue Zones of Happiness: Lessons From the World's Happiest People (Blue Zones, The) by Dan Buettner
https://a.co/5cuMMHz

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As we were saying…

We can't afford to build places where people just park their bodies at night," Burden said. "We can't afford to spend a single transportation dollar that doesn't increase land value rather than decrease it." We should go back to building towns the way our great-grandparents did, he suggested. Most people today want to live in a community where they don't have to drive long distances. They want to live near enough to the stores and jobs so they can walk, take a bus, or ride a bike wherever they need to go. If Muscatine wanted to stay competitive, retain existing businesses, attract new ones, and have money in the treasury for parks and other amenities, then the best thing residents could do would be to focus on making their town walkable and livable, Burden said. That meant adding sidewalks, improving crosswalks, replacing intersections with roundabouts in some places, and converting one-way streets to run in both directions. "One-way streets help move people faster," Burden said. "But is that your goal? To empty out downtown?" You should be doing just the opposite, he argued. You want people to linger downtown and enjoy themselves. "Then, before you know it, your children won't be moving off to other cities. Everything they want will be right here in your own community.

Dan Buettner, The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living Like the World's Healthiest People
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Ikigai

According to the Japanese, everyone has an ikigai - a reason for living. And according to the residents of the Japanese village with the world's longest-living people, finding it is the key to a happier and longer life. Having a strong sense of ikigai - the place where passion, mission, vocation, and profession intersect - means that each day is infused with meaning. It's the reason we get up in the morning. It's also the reason many Japanese never really retire (in fact there's no word in Japanese that means retire in the sense it does in English): They remain active and work at what they enjoy, because they've found a real purpose in life - the happiness of always being busy. In researching this book, the authors interviewed the residents of the Japanese village with the highest percentage of 100-year-olds - one of the world's Blue Zones. Ikigai reveals the secrets to their longevity and happiness: how they eat, how they move, how they work, how they foster collaboration and community, and - their best-kept secret - how they find the ikigai that brings satisfaction to their lives. And it provides practical tools to help you discover your own ikigai. Because who doesn't want to find happiness in every day? https://www.audible.com/pd/Ikigai-Audiobook/B074WFYZYH

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Kade raised a question...

of whether any governments actually are pursuing the Happiness agenda (making allowance for the fact that different cultures, Bhuddist Bhutan for instance, have non-western notions of what it even means). Maybe not, but maybe they should. That's the Blue Zones (and Jeffersonian) view Buettner defends, pretty ably, in chapter 6...

""The happiness and prosperity of our citizens… is the only legitimate object of government."—Thomas Jefferson, 1811

AS INSPIRATIONAL AS THESE STORIES ARE from Costa Rica, Denmark, and Singapore—from the Blue Zones of Happiness, the homes of the happiest people in the world—there are ways in which the solutions they represent do not translate easily into solutions for the United States. What works for Denmark, a social democracy of five million people, for instance, might not necessarily work for a sprawling, diverse, argumentative, freedom-loving nation like our own.

Unlike Denmark's wealthy, well-educated, relatively homogeneous society of consensus seekers, the United States is a crazy quilt of races, religions, and ethnic groups more accustomed to settling issues through competition than cooperation.

Likewise, could we really emulate the tolerance of Costa Rica? Or the values-driven security of Singapore? I think so. Each of these nations has in a sense manufactured happiness by adopting policies that favor quality of life, and that's something we in the United States can do, too…" https://a.co/bNMHedL

To save the world, or savor it?

Also, I love that Part 3 begins with one of my favorite quotes from the great essayist E.B. White...

" I arise in the morning," E. B. White famously said, "torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." The key is to find that sweet spot between savoring life now and doing things that lead to a richer, more meaningful outcome in the future. As we've seen in Costa Rica, Denmark, and Singapore, people in those places aren't happier because they try harder to be happy—they enjoy good lives because their surroundings nudge them into behaviors more likely to produce happiness. In this section, we turn to you. How can you set up your life so your circumstances nudge you into behaviors that make you happier?"

— The Blue Zones of Happiness: Lessons From the World's Happiest People 

Also, I want to move now to 

Boulder...

"...many ways in which Boulder excels: It has one of the nation's lowest smoking rates, one of the lowest obesity rates, and one of the highest rates of exercise. Boulder residents report high life satisfaction and feel more safe and secure than residents of any other American community. Probably most important, they feel that they accomplish meaningful things every day. When asked if, during the past seven days, they've felt "active and productive every day," Boulder residents overwhelmingly responded in the affirmative. Pleasure, purpose, pride: Boulder provides the context for all..."