"Best-selling National Geographic author and speaker Dan Buettner shares the factors that boost quality of life in four of the happiest places on Earth.
For much of the last decade, Dan Buettner has traveled to the places where people live longest and where they claim to derive the greatest satisfaction from their lives. His investigations on human longevity culminated in articles for National Geographic magazine and National Geographic Adventure, and in the New York Times bestselling book The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest. Buettner's latest book, Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way, examines one of the crucial factors in longevity, happiness, and what makes people happy. He'll share highlights from his new book, including insights on how to thrive in the hectic environment of Washington, D.C., in a National Geographic Live! presentation at Society headquarters next Monday evening, November 29.
I asked Buettner to share some of the secrets of the world's happiest places.
Dan, how did you first become interested in what lies at the heart of human happiness?
I've been a career-long explorer, and Peter Miller--my great editor at National Geographic magazine--at one point told me that modern exploration needs to add to the body of knowledge. That led me away from transcontinental bike rides, and eventually to longevity: What can traditional cultures teach us about how to live longer?
The idea behind The Blue Zones was to find the evidence-based parts of the world where people live the longest, and then to distill out their secrets for people to actually use. The new book, Thrive, is a progression of the same idea: What if you could find the evidence-based parts of the world where people are measurably happier, and what kinds of prescriptive could you distill out of that. Hence the book.
Over the course of researching and writing this book, you went to four very different places where people report that, by various measures, they are exceptionally happy and content with their lives. Could you share some of the details?
Sure. Happiness varies a little bit from place to place. People who live in Asia are hardwired a little bit differently than people who live in the United States. When it comes to happiness, there are some universals, but there are culturally specific differences too.
The key to the book was to find the happiest region or the happiest country on each of four continents and look for universals there. National Geographic gave us the money to work with three big databases that represent 95 percent of the human population to find these places, so it wasn't just a bunch of editors sitting around and saying "Let's go here, let's go there."
............... for those who want to find their happy place but who might live here in the United States and don't want to leave home, ....... there's San Luis Obispo.
San Luis Obispo paints a really good picture of the way we ought to be setting up our cities. I'll tell you a secret right now about happiness: There's no silver bullet. You have to find some silver buckshot. San Luis Obispo has the best emotional health in the countryand the highest level of well-being, I believe, because they have a dozen or so things going for them that were put in place in the late 1970s.
They made the decision as a city, rather than making the city optimal for commerce, to make it optimal for quality of life. It used to be a forest of signs. Signs beget more signs. They instead limited the size of signs and put the resources into aesthetics. They outlawed fast-food drive-throughs so you don't have idling cars polluting the air, it's harder for people to eat fast food. They were the first place in the world to outlaw smoking in bars and restaurants, so as a result you have about the lowest rate of smoking in the country.
You can stand any place in San Luis Obispo, a city of about a quarter of a million people, and look around and see green. They have zoned it such that there's no building beyond a certain point, so everybody has access to green space, which we know lowers stress levels, and has access to recreation.
And then there's the big one that we know on a day-to-day basis, commuting in our cars, is one of the things we like the least in America. San Luis Obispo has created an urban environment where driving is a little bit of a hassle, but it's really easy to bike and it's easy to walk. They have 16-foot-wide sidewalks, there are outdoor cafes, and people walking to work see their friends. It's just a pleasant place.
It goes back to Ken Schwartz, an architecture professor and five-term San Luis Obispo mayor, and his students, who intuited that quality of life was the important thing to focus on. They audaciously suggested that the city's 250-year-old Mission Plaza be used, not as a parking lot, but as a common area for people to gather. They put an art center there, a place for festivals. That seemed to be the galvanizing event."
You can read more about our area from the countless links available when searching "San Luis Obispo, the Best Place to Live." We think it is.....but so do others that have visited our unique environment and experienced our near perfect climate! We are happy to show you our wonderful spot on this great Earth!
Linda Butler, licensed Real Estate Agent - DRE # 00597458
