How to Live to be 100
The keys to longevity and the role of Christianity
It’s the beginning of a new year, which means that we each tend to take inventory of our lives. With varying degrees of intentionality, we review the year before, complete with all of its trials and triumphs. We then look to the year ahead, perhaps with a rather complicated cocktail of anticipation and apprehension.
At the beginning of 2023, I took inventory similarly to how I did in years past, though my mental and physical health came into particular view. Mental and physical health are, as trauma therapists now understanding, much more intertwined than we’ve typically assumed in the West—and understanding likely popularized no more thoroughly than in Bessel van der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps the Score.
I entered 2023 feeling beat up and physically spent. 2022 was a particularly hard year, dealing with the aftermath of what spiritual abuse does to both body and soul. What’s more, not long into the new year, I lost a beloved uncle far too early in his life. I found myself confronted with the simple truth: If I don’t take care of my body, I'm going to shorten my time in it (on this side of the resurrection, at least).
So I started a journey of getting healthy, both physically and mentally. I began a regular discipline of contemplative prayer, the first long-term exercise regiment I’ve ever been able to sustain, attended to mobility issues, processed ministry pain with trusted friends, and other practices to get holistically healthy. Upon entering 2024, I take more satisfaction in the fact that I established healthy rhythms to promote longevity than in accomplishing any particular set of goals.
In 2023 I also stumbled across Dan Buettner’s documentary Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones. In it, Buettner unpacks much of his time doing ethnographic field research in various community contexts where people live disproportionately long lives (often able bodied well into their 90s and 100s). I was not only struck by the common themes these communities all share in their life practices that contribute to their longevity—despite living in very different cultures—but also (though Buettner does not share this conclusion) the unique vision the Christian faith can play in shaping longevity in life.
While I would encourage you to watch the documentary, and to follow some of Buettner’s work, I wanted to share some of his conclusions and how the Christian vision for abundant life speaks to these conclusions uniquely.
People who Live to Be 100…
1. Move Naturally
Buettner found that those who lived longest across cultures and regions of the world did so because they moved naturally in life. They didn’t necessarily have gym memberships or look like statues of Greek gods. Rather, they prioritized moving in general, often preferring to walk rather than drive to destinations. They did things by hand. They often tended to gardens.
2. Had a Positive Outlook
No, this is not the “positive manifestation” nonsense we hear in popular secular (and far too often, Christian) discourse. It isn’t about decreeing and declaring anything. Instead, Buettner found that centenarians had an overarching sense of purpose in life—people who lived long had something to live for. That purpose was often intertwined with a sincerely held faith and connection to a faith community (of any kind, not simply Christian). And centenarians had a healthy capacity to rest and relax—they mitigated stress and worked in order to live (rather than the other way around).
3. Ate Wisely
Here we might assume that centenarians had a particular diet. Not true. Possibly, they ate one particular superfood? Not necessarily, though most blue zone cultures consume legumes and superfoods like purple sweet potatoes on the regular.
There was no particular one-size-fits all diet. Instead, Buettner identifies that they ate primarily plant-based diets, drank wine regularly, and observed an overall moderate approach to food and drink consumption.
While I obviously wasn't with Buettner in his travels, in watching the documentary, it also appeared clear that many of these cultures prepared and grew their own food or prioritized local foods and wines—not as a consumer fad, but as a way of life.
4. Had Healthy Connections
Elsewhere, Buettner has noted that three healthy, sustained friendships can add upwards of eight years of longevity to life. Centenarians prioritized rhythms of connecting with friends and family, sought healthy partnerships, and were connected to broader community support systems that supported them and encouraged their flourishing lifestyle.
A Christian Vision for Longevity
I was struck by how much of Buettner’s conclusions was intertwined with the net positive impact that connection to faith communities often provide. But this positive benefit isn’t unique to Christian community. In fact, if I’m honest (and if you are too), there are many ways in which being connected to Christian community can work against longevity. We Christians in the States often have a very poor relationship with things like creation stewardship, moderation in diet, and healthy connection.
If we’re not careful, we can hijack people’s sense of purpose and calling to be less about what God desires to do through them, as determined by helping people discern the voice of the Spirit…and instead about what we want God do to through them for the church. Even as a pastor, I’ve had my fair share of people try to tell me how my calling was to serve this person or that organization.
But when we step away from what often is and look at a vision for what can be, our Faith provides a vision not simply for what Christ’s design is for society upon his return, but how we are to live flourishing, abundantly whole lives now in light of and in anticipation of his return.
When I look at what it takes to live to be 100, I see several themes Scripture and Church history call us to cultivate in our lives…themes that both include and transcend those identified in Buettner’s documentary:
Holy Stewardship: In each of these blue zone communities, centenarians practiced rhythms of stewardship—of creation, of their bodies, of being connected to the land, of stewarding time. Too often when we talk about stewardship we wind up talking about tithing. But a holy (i.e., “uncommon sort,” “unique,” “other than”) stewardship takes into account how we manage everything in our lives. Cultivating and being connected with God’s very good creation, a healthy connection with the land, plants, and animals, maintaining healthy stewardship of our body through regular movement, healthy habits, and moderate consumption, etc. Approaching life with an intention to connect with God, humanity, and creation in a way that edifies, roots, and gives glory to God is what a vision of holy stewardship looks like.
Sabbath: Sabbath is more than a day off, and it is more than a religious routine. Sabbath calls us to recognize our dependence upon God and demonstrate it through committing to rest. Sabbath calls us to recognize that God begins and sustains the work—not by our might or power, but by his Spirit. Sabbath is concerned not only with rest for you as an individual, but for the community of Faith, and even for creation. The vision of Sabbath in the First Testament even calls us to consider issues of systemic economic injustice and speaks prophetically to modern issues like slave reparations, debt cancellation, and land ownership. But we might consider how healthy Sabbath—especially as it relates to our relationship with work—might encourage longevity in our lives. We work to live, not live to work. The vision of runaway neoliberal capitalism is to turn us all into “workers” when God calls us daughters and sons—to see us as a labor force when we are His missionary people—to see life as about what can be produced when life is about abiding in Christ. We should consider what a healthy vision of Sabbath means for our own longevity and for the flourishing of our communities.
Shalom: I’ve talked and written in many places about how shalom is more than just “peace.” Shalom, in the perspective of the Judaism from which Christianity was birthed, is concerned with the presence of wholeness. The presence of shalom means that all is as it should be—as God had intended it to be. Seeking and cultivating shalom—being “shalom makers” as it were, means that the wholeness of God is a chief concern in how we not only deal with the outside world, but also consider what it means for us to live abundant lives.
Authentic Community: What I found most interesting is how deeply the practices identified by Buettner had to do with the community inasmuch as it had to do with the individual. In the West, and especially in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, we are exceedingly individualistic. But slowly, even governments are coming to the realization that unchecked, rampant individualism has a negative impact on society and even individual healthy. We need healthy support systems in our lives. We need those relational support systems to be trusting, where we can be truly authentic and transparent about who we are without fear of rejection—that’s a psychological safety that is, if we’re honest, rare in many local churches today. And Christians tend to note no more significant degree of strong relational connections than our non-Christian counterparts. While I am encouraged by many of the potential positives of digital technology, I do fear that the erosion of the practice of frequenting community hubs (e.g. Rotary clubs, community centers, even the neighborhood pub) has diminished our space for community. We need to intentionally cultivate that. What was encouraging about Buettner’s findings, for those who are either geographically or relationally distant from blood family, is that “fictive” or “chosen” kin…the type of familial bonds you choose to create, despite no blood relation, promoted longevity just like close ties with blood kinship.
I wonder what 2024 might look like if we consider these principles of longevity—not simply as a weight loss scheme, or even out of a desire to achieve personal healthy. But what if we regarded cultivating ecosystems of wholeness and health in every aspect of our lives and the world around us, a chief priority? In doing so with the Christian vision of flourishing I identified herein, it would seem that a holistic, healthy vision for God’s people to flourish also means we might just live a little longer, too.