The Blue Zones, Second Edition — Dan Buettner

There’s a lot of interesting stuff contained within this book.   Good luck if you can find yourself in a situation where you have all the support and society around you that allows you to achieve these things.

Sadly, most of us simply don’t have the land available to farm our own organic vegetables and fruit for every meal, most people don’t live in places where they can drink pure water that isn’t some other town’s poorly-treated sewage dumped upstream into the river that fills the local reservoir, and most people don’t get to live in places free of all the traffic, and industrial, produced noise and air pollution.

Most people won’t ever be surrounded by family and friends their whole lives that would support, share and help them in achieving the same organic wholefood, stress free, pollution free, clean living lifestyle that is espoused in these stories.

I’d heard a lot of good things about this book and i really was looking forward to reading it.   Having read it, i just find most of it disingenuous, in that it is utterly ridiculous to suggest that most people could have a lifestyle like this even if they wanted to.   But hey, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, maybe you can find some things within to help you.

It’s even suggested at the end of the book that you build your own blue zone.   Good luck with that, i sincerely hope you can find yourself some space in this ever more overpopulated world that leaves less and less space free from air pollution, light pollution, noise, junk food, bad people, traffic, noise, industry, habitat destruction and all the rest of modern society’s garbage: because that’s what you need to do.   Maybe when Antarctica finally melts you’ll find some nice, free, unpolluted land, but i reckon the corporations will have beaten you to it with massive military, mining and construction projects.

My biggest gripe with this book is that there are far better ways for people to be thinking about improving their health and longevity in today’s modern societies.   This book suggests 10 extra years of healthy life, but consider, when it’s becoming more and more common that people are sick and diseased and reliant upon medication to survive in their 30’s and 40’s, is 10 extra years all you really want?   I want 40 or 50 years of extra healthy life and this book isn’t offering that at all.

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