The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (11 page)

What Reduces Your Chances of Dying the Most?

What reduces your odds of dying most? According to an analysis of existing research, social interaction
. (Image and Figure Credits
2.3
)

Let’s return to inland Sardinia for a moment, and Dr. Gianni Pes. As I mentioned, longevity runs in his own family. His great-uncle was born in 1893, the year the diesel engine was invented, and died in 2004, the year Facebook was founded; he had lived for 110 years and 125 days. Gianni also had a grandmother who died at ninety-three and a paternal uncle who died in 2011 at the age of ninety-seven. And though Gianni is well-versed in the conditions that foster an exceptionally long life in a Blue Zone, including the genetic isolation, the mountainous terrain, and the dietary factors, he also stresses the importance of the constant face-to-face contact that is so central to Sardinian village life. “Everybody is in close contact with other members of the community. My great-uncle was no exception. He used to visit friends and relatives and was fond of going hunting on Sundays
until he was ninety-eight years of age. And if I remember correctly, he was able to shoot a wild boar at that age.”

Gianni’s own father made his social rounds at the age of 105 by walking the countryside paths he’d walked his whole life. When that was no longer possible, he lived with one of his daughters and everyone came to him. “The old and the oldest old are very protected. They are considered the symbol or strength of the family,” added Gianni.

Pasquale Frasconi, 110, walking with his great-nephew, Dr. Gianni Pes
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)

Just as they looked after their parents, adults in the community expect that as they become frail, they too will be cared for. But there is also the sense that a person who has reached the age of ninety or a hundred deserves respect and is entitled to be listened to. Both kinds of support are freely offered. Even though he is an academic of international renown, Gianni still lives within a hundred kilometers of his birthplace and found time to visit and discuss politics with his 105-year-old uncle. For him, such ongoing social contact is obvious. No matter how well-educated or far-flung, Sardinians treat close contact with aging family members as a moral imperative.

Though there is a powerful “female effect”—women are more likely to look after their aging relatives in their own homes than men—I wondered how working people of either sex sustained this level of commitment. “Of course we have to balance our careers with family life,” Gianni told me when I asked. “But as a Sardinian, I never forget to visit my mother. She lives seventy kilometers from me, but every week, on Sunday, I go to visit her. She is eighty-seven now but is mentally fantastic. I talk to her about my work at the university and she always gives me a lot of interesting advice. You
know, sometimes in the academic world there are conflicts. And I talk openly with her about these problems and she is able to tell me, for example, ‘You should be less conflictual with the people who criticize your work, or in the way you’re dealing with the university.’ I recognize her ability and her competence in dealing with these types of problems.” He clearly viewed a close relationship between adult children and their aging parents as a Sardinian trait. More interesting to me, though, was that he was describing true reciprocity. Caring for increasingly fragile seniors was more than a duty.

EVERYBODY DOES IT

The afternoon that I met Giovanni Corrias, a 102-year-old bachelor from Villagrande, he was sitting in a wooden rocking chair surrounded by younger women. Maria Corrias, the sixty-five-year-old niece who had lived with him for the past twenty-three years, was there. Also his twenty-five-year-old grandniece, Sarah, and the visitors: Eva, Delia (my interpreter), and me. We were drinking espresso from thimble-like cups in Maria and Giovanni’s immaculate living room when the doorbell rang. His sister-in-law had come to drop off some produce. That made six of us. If he thought all this female company unusual, he didn’t let on.

Zio Giovanni’s white shirt and gray trousers were carefully pressed. Under a woolen cap, his black eyes were alert; his sober, slightly hostile manner put the lie to the notion that you need to think positive thoughts to live a long life. When I asked him why he thought he’d lived so long, he shot back, “Why would I die?”

Maria: “He doesn’t like that question. Ask him a different one.”

So what’s the secret of a long life, Zio? I asked. Is it a lifetime of hill walking? Family time? Playing the
sullitu
(the Sardinian flute) or drinking the local red wine?

“Eh, beh. I like wine—maybe little too much,” he replied. Then a pause. He cast a dark look in my direction and tipped his chin up angrily, suddenly erupting: “Nobody has to know my secrets!”

The real secret lies as much in his genes as in the culture of his village. Zio Giovanni was lucky to have been born in a place where female family members refer to him as
il tesoro
and find it a
gioia
to live with him and offer him love, companionship, and a large dose of respect. I asked Maria, his sixty-five-year-old niece, if it really is a joy to mind an irascible shut-in. To make sure he doesn’t fall. To prepare and purée his favorite foods. To bathe him every morning while he sits on a special waterproof chair in the shower. To carefully pat him dry and then soothe his easily abraded 102-year-old skin with expensive creams, a different one for each part of his body. Or is it a duty?

“No, no! It’s a pleasure for me,” his niece insisted. “You don’t understand. He is my heritage. The seniors of this village are my heritage. I do it with love.”

I persist with another question. So does living this way really make you happy?

“
Certo!
It’s difficult and it’s a great sacrifice, but I do it with pleasure. When I was young, he helped me a lot. Now I’m grateful. And our jewel is still here!”

I turn to her niece, Sarah, a dark-haired young beauty with cellphone in hand. “Well? Are you going to do this for your elderly parents, aunts, and uncles too?”

“
Certo
. Of course I will,” she replied. “You have to find time to do it. Everybody does it.”

Whether Sarah’s generation will provide the TLC that her relatives require to live to one hundred is anyone’s guess. But when your spouse and your friends—and even your children—have died, people decades younger who call you
il tesoro
can make a world of difference.

But what if you don’t happen to live in an isolated mountaintop village?

O
ut of seven billion people in the world, six billion think religion helps them live a long, meaningful life—and science tells us they’re onto something. People who practice a religion are happier, healthier, and live longer than atheists, according to a mountain of empirical evidence.
¹
One seven-year study of ninety thousand women from across the United States found that those who attended religious services at least once a week were 20 percent less likely to die. Another study, of three thousand older women, found that religious practice forestalls cognitive decline.
²
And even if there’s a sex difference—there are more long-living female believers around the world than male—the health benefits of religious practice accrue to men too. Most psychologists agree that the protective effects of religion are primarily social, due not so much to the redemptive power of prayer as to the fact that religions help bring human beings together in one place. Rabbi Marc Gellman of the US cable show
God Squad
agrees, and told the following story to American journalist Zev Chafetz. “The writer Harry Golden once asked his father, who was an atheist, why he went to services every Saturday. The old man told him, ‘My friend Garfinkle goes to talk to God, and I go to talk to Garfinkle.’ ”
³

If Golden’s father and Garfinkle had lived in the same village, they might not have needed the structured weekly gathering that religions provides. In fact, belonging to a religious group
is
a lot like living in a village. On the one hand, your behavior is on display: people watch your every move. But on the other hand, people also know when you need help and are more likely to provide it.

These acts of altruism are contagious and they bind the community. One of my academic heroes, the down-to-earth American sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, considered her childhood summers spent on the family’s farm in Turner, Maine (population 5,734), as a series of pointless chores at first. Weeding her aunt’s cornfield and stacking roof shingles just didn’t do it for the ten-year-old. At the time she didn’t perceive what is implicit in village life: long-term bonds are forged through a casual exchange of home-baked goods, babysitting, borrowed tools, shared expertise, and spur-of-the-moment visits. “People didn’t give practical help just to get things done; they got things done, in part, to affirm their bonds,” she writes. “Part of such bonds expressed love of one another’s company, but they also represented an unspoken pact: ‘I’m on call for you in your hour of need and you are for me.’ Villagers might quarrel, gossip, get bored, and leave. But living there, they paid a moral tax to the community in this readiness to ‘just do.’ ”
⁴

Religious people are more likely to pay that tax, surveys tell us. They volunteer more time to community service, offer more spare change to homeless people they pass on the street, and donate more money to organized charity and more blood to blood banks than secular folks do.
⁵
Compared to atheists, their altruism is amplified if, right before they’re asked to pitch in, they’re somehow reminded of God (or of some supernatural “watcher”), which erases their anonymity, according to experiments by Canadian psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff.
⁶
Earlier research in the United Kingdom had shown that people were three times more likely to pay for their cup of tea when a picture of human eyes (as
opposed to a still life) was posted in an “honor system” office kitchen, and were more likely to give to charity when they sensed that someone was watching them.
⁷
It’s as if there’s a little sensor in our brains that picks up cues about how to behave in a group environment. Even bonobos, one of our closest primate ancestors, will open a trapdoor in order to share their food with strangers as long as there’s a little social interaction first, according to research by Duke University primatologists Jingzhi Tan and Brian Hare. Animals that wouldn’t interact with the potential “donor” bonobos were out of luck.
⁸
Could it be that altruism evolved and is more likely to catch on when there’s no chance of anonymity? That’s what the evidence suggests. Anyone who’s been the target of online trolls knows that anonymity can provide cover for pretty nasty behavior. But the sense that you’re being observed in the here and now seems to make people more civil.

Whether prompted by empathy, guilt, the wrath of God, the promise of rewards in the world to come, or the fact that the neighbors are watching from behind their lace curtains, there is clearly a religious—and village—impetus to pay it forward. Such mutual aid was adaptive, meaning that in the evolutionary past, religious adherents were more likely than non-practitioners to make it to adulthood and to have children who survived long enough to produce children of their own. Norenzayan and Shariff speculate that by the time human settlements got so large that people couldn’t see the whites of each other’s eyes, reminders of God or an omniscient supernatural power may have curtailed bad behavior, while increasing trust, loyalty, and generosity toward others within the group, ultimately making social groups more cohesive and impervious to outside threats.
⁹