A week at a blue-zone retreat in Sardinia lays bare the tensions between longevity and loneliness.
The main idea, that it’s healthy to live in a community, is largely uncontested. “We know that social network is extremely important in improving longevity,” says Arjan Gjonça, a demographer at the London School of Economics and Political Science. And yet for many modern city dwellers, it’s easier to access experimental drugs than friends.
There’s never been a better time for travelers looking to get well in exotic locales. This particular tourism niche was valued at $650 billion in 2023, according to the Global Wellness Institute, and was estimated to be worth $1.3 trillion in 2025. Some of these vacationers have modest aims — to jump-start a fitness project or relax on a massage table — but places like Six Senses in Turkey and Canyon Ranch in Arizona cater to visitors with the more ambitious goal of life extension. At medical wellness retreats, visitors can kick off their holiday with epigenetic analysis, then consult specialists on how to slow the aging of their organs with individualized treatments for the colon, brain, heart, scalp, skin and teeth.
Skipping sleep and working overtime “used to be a badge of honor” among chief executives, says Mark Sands, vice president of wellness at Six Senses, but “there’s a massive increase in these guys taking really good care of their health.” Vicente Mera, the in-house physician at luxury clinic SHA Wellness in Alicante, Spain, tells me that the $11,000 Advanced Longevity package is “very, very popular.” It features IV drips, hyperbaric chambers and (at the company’s outpost in Cancún, Mexico, where they’re legal) stem cell and platelet-rich plasma therapies.
There are more than 100,000 centenarians in the US, and that number is expected to quadruple by midcentury. The wealthiest Americans are living longer than ever and driving an explosion of interest in healthy aging (at a time when life expectancy overall has stagnated and begun to fall). Peter Attia’s 2022 book, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity, has sold more than 2 million copies. Bryan Johnson, a tech mogul who takes more than 100 pills a day and gets blood transfusions from his teenage son, has millions of social media followers, many of whom upload their biomarkers to his “rejuvenation Olympics” leaderboard and embrace his motto, “Don’t Die.”
In both health and beauty, this trend is largely driven by technological advances. Wearable devices that track our glucose level, heart rate and blood oxygen have migrated from the brains of Silicon Valley tech nerds to millions of wrists around the world. Thanks to retinol and injectables, no one really knows what a thirtysomething is supposed to look like anymore.
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Our retreat is a highlights tour of village life. We meet Giovanni, an impeccably dressed tailor who makes wedding suits on an antique pedal sewing machine. He invites us to guess his age, then does a jig when he reveals he’s 92. We meet Francesca, 32, who’s left her village of Sorgono only once, to attend university in Cagliari. She dropped out after two years because she missed her family and didn’t need a degree to work on her father’s farm. Giulia, a chef in her mid-30s with chic gray streaks in her hair that make me reconsider my salon appointment, tells us about her 5-year-old daughter, Olinda, named for her great-grandmother, who died at 103, surrounded by four generations of her family.
Our disparate retreat cohort soon becomes its own community. By Day 2, we’re swapping life stories, confiding in one another about breakups and bereavements. Porcu adds us to a WhatsApp group, Blue Zone Tribe, which soon threatens my phone’s memory capacity, as my travel companions upload enough videos to produce a Panorama-style documentary about our experiences pressing grapes and baking coccoi bread. Our camaraderie makes Porcu proud. “What’s the point of living to 100 if you’re alone?” he asks.
Full story: We’re Obsessed With Living Longer, But What About Living Better? (Bloomberg)