A few weeks ago I gave the eulogy at my father’s funeral. As I spoke to the gathered mourners, I was struck by the fact that there was not a spare seat in the packed crematorium hall. He had five children and 11 grandchildren, but still: where had all these people come from? Who were they? How did they know him?
My father was approaching his 88th birthday when he died. He had lived alone as a widower for 13 years, and he had done so having survived his own emergency operation the day after my mother died, which left him in a coma for weeks, followed by months of rehabilitation.
A lot of people – especially men – don’t survive for long on their own in these circumstances. I had been surprised at how well he recovered and looked after himself.
I had assumed he didn’t see many people, especially after he had to give up driving. He was adamant that he didn’t want to live in a home. I would regularly pick him up to take him to my house for Sunday lunch and then drive him back to what, I supposed, was a lonely life on the whole.
But speaking to mourners after the funeral, I learned that my father had developed an extensive network of local friends. There was the Indian family from the nearby newsagents who turned up with a wealth of fond anecdotes about my dad. The Polish couple who ran the cafe along the road that he visited regularly. The family across the street who told me he was on first-name terms with all the local bus drivers, whom he’d learned to address in their native tongues. And there was also a large number of old friends and their children with whom he’d remained in close contact.
According to the mass of evidence Susan Pinker assembles in The Village Effect, the secret to my father’s longevity was that he continued to see people he knew and liked daily. She tells us that chronic loneliness alters the expression of our genes in every cell of our bodies. And not in a good way.
As well as this, two neuropeptides – oxytocin and vasopressin – are secreted in the bloodstream when we form and maintain meaningful relationships, and these chemicals help to counter stress and repair wounds.
We live in a health-obsessed age in which we are assailed by reports that tell us what we should and shouldn’t eat and drink and do if we want to live long and well. But one of the principal determining factors for both are our social networks.
Not the mostly illusory ones that exist on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but those that involve physical meetings. The subtitle of Pinker’s book is Why Face-to-Face Contact Matters. Numerous studies show that, for example, people with active social lives have higher cancer survival rates than people who are isolated.
That doesn’t prove a causal link. The kind of people who have active social lives might also be the kind of people with stronger resistance to cancer. Pinker is ready for this argument and promptly cites a study of rats in which the females were randomly separated, some to live in groups, the others in isolation. The socially isolated female rats developed 84 times the amount of breast cancer tumours as those that were placed in groups. As Pinker concludes: “Neglecting to keep in close contact with people who are important to you is at least as dangerous to your health as a pack-a-day cigarette habit, hypertension, or obesity.”
The problem about putting the issue like this – and Pinker repeats the same point in similar ways – is that it turns the natural and enjoyable process of sociability into yet another health obligation, such as walking every day, not drinking too much and laying off sticky puddings.
“Hi, would you like to meet for lunch next week as part of my integrated health and longevity programme?” is not the sort of offer you want to make or, indeed, hear if you value family and friendship for their own sakes.
Pinker’s book is steeped in prescriptive tips for developing “tools” to maximise “social capital”. One senses that the slightly obvious advice, illustrative homilies and can-do approach to ageing is better suited to the North American market – Pinker is Canadian.
But the temptation to pathologise certain behaviours is inherent to the self-improvement genre and The Village Effect, for all its careful discussion of the science and diligent reference to academic studies, is written very much from a self-improvement perspective.
Presumably that’s what sells books. In its favour, it’s not a hard sell: the subtitle isn’t, after all, How to Stay Alive to 100. But it’s a persistent one. It’s not difficult to grasp the concept that, in an age of computerised contact, the old-fashioned habit of seeing other people in the flesh has its psychological, and therefore physical, advantages.
I was firmly on board by page 30. By page 300 I had lost the will not to live, exactly, but at least the will to extend life any further than strictly necessary. Although I’ve always thought of myself as a social person, the relentless message to circulate, stay in touch and get out there left me with a subversive desire to run a major health risk and sit alone in a dark room for a while.
That’s a little unfair on Pinker, who’s a lively and informed writer. But, like many such works, this is really a long magazine article padded out to book length. She travels to the central mountains of Sardinia, where the inhabitants tend to live longer and in better health than the rest of the planet’s people. She learns there that the locals make a point of seeing each other a lot, family is important, and old people are esteemed and respected by those of all ages.
I saw much the same thing myself in Ikaria, a Greek island that also claims the world title for longevity. But I’ve seen much the same in many places where life expectancy is far lower. Surely the point is that, live long or die early, it’s better to do so among people that love you.
I can only guess what my father would have made of this book. A keen reader, he wasn’t one for self-help guides. All things considered, I think he would have preferred to walk to the newsagents and talk about the cricket.
The Village Effect is published by Atlantic Books (£14.99). Click here to buy it for £11.99
