One of my life goals was always to live to 100. More and more people are doing so. Why not me? Well this is a common area of interest, so much so, that it has brought people to study this. Researchers have discovered so called blue zones around the world where people routinely live to 100. The first researchers say that they are called blue zones because they started circling the areas in blue. Personally, I think it is a dig at older ladies and their blue hair.
Is it worth living to 100? After all if you are in severe pain from 80 to 100, would you really want to live those extra years? Similarly, if your last 20 years were spent confined to your bed, would you really want those extra years? I think most people would join me in saying no, it wouldn’t be worth it. So living to 100 may actually be conditional on the quality of life.
But the people in the blue zones live long and healthy lives, They have good physical health till almost the end. That does indeed sound like a long life worth living. And with many people in the area living to 100, they still have their peers living a long life with them. So I bet they aren’t that lonely, either. Still one thing makes me wonder if living to 100 would be worth it.
You see, all these blue zones have another thing in common. They all eat a lot of beans.
Yeah, beans. The musical fruit. The more you eat the more you toot.
Kids laugh it off when they toot. They find humour in it. But imagine tooting all the time, as an adult. The volume might inhibit you at meditation, during musical events, or just when you are intent on hearing what people are saying. Most annoying of all are the ones with terrible smell. How are you supposed to keep any friendship intact when you both fart something fierce around each other? The humour would wear thin after decades of this. How would marriage last through too many and too smelly farts?
Yes you could plug your nose somehow. But I’ve heard that healthwise you are supposed to breathe through your nose. So blue zone folk would breathe through their noses no matter how offensive the farts of their brethren might be.
And if all the world was a blue zone, munching away on our beans, wouldn’t we be producing more methane than the atmosphere could handle? Methane is the gas we produce when tooting and it is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So if the earth became one large blue zone, climate change would be even more drastic,
Maybe we should just stick to living to a less smelly eighty years old.
