Thanks to the efforts of vanguard sociologists, geneticists and historians, we know where the world’s largest concentration of centenarians live and how they spend their days. You don’t even have to search far and wide for the answers. The crazy part? This doesn’t involve some complex Ponce de Leónian quest. It’s possible to put years on your life, to surge past both average life expectancy and your own expectations, by resolving to live a certain way. Where does that other 93% come from? Your lifestyle. More recently, scientists have concluded that the true heritability of human longevity at birth is closer to just 7%. Since the mid-1990s, in fact, following the infamous Danish twins study, researchers have understood longevity to be “only moderately heritable.” For a while, this spawned estimates that genetics accounted for somewhere between 20 and 30% of one’s longevity. If my dad had a stroke and his dad had a stroke then one’s probably coming for me too, right? If I make it to 80, or - god forbid - 90, I’ve just beaten the odds.
It trivializes the concept of lifespan and longevity, reducing the science to a throw-your-hands-in-the-hair “Who the hell knows!” It reinforces the idea that our time on this planet isn’t necessarily under our control. Interacting with centenarians in this way has long made them seem like circus oddities. You’ve lived through both World Wars?! How’d you do it? Then Muriel gets to flash a mischievous grin and tells us she smoked a pack a day for 50 years.
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She’s deaf or blind or both or neither, sitting in a wheelchair in the “good spot” next to the TV set, and a reporter asks her her secret. A local news station visits a retirement home to celebrate Muriel’s 106th birthday. At this point, we’re all familiar with the trope.
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