Alone for months, never lonely: what a Sardinian blue zone taught me about living longer

On a windy hillside near Baunei, in Sardinia, I was asking a question I was slightly embarrassed to ask.

It was 24 August 2024, near the end of the year my son Alek and I spent on the road looking for longevity. I asked Paola Demurtas whether the secret of this place is simply staying joyful. She said yes, absolutely, and started to explain how the elders here keep a positive attitude that the rest of us are losing. Then she broke off:

Paola Demurtas: “There is a shepherd calling the goats now. You can—”

Marek: “That’s good. Hi, shepherd.”

The wind on that recording is louder than both of us. It was the first of many interruptions that day, and every one of them turned out to be part of the answer.

How Paola found us

Paola found us before we found Sardinia. She had been following our quest, and one day she wrote to me on Instagram: whenever you come to Sardinia, I can be your guide.

When we arrived, she was there. She took my son and me to the centenarian villages, translated for us when we sat with the elders, and felt like family straight away. She was born and raised in this blue zone and later studied it at university, so she knows it from the inside and from the books. Today people come from all over the world to see it through her eyes.

Our friend Kamil flew over to join us, as he did only for the places that mattered most on the quest. Sardinia was close enough to Warsaw, and it mattered.

The fear that is not about dying

Last week Liz Parrish told us she is afraid of losing the people who hold her memories (you can read that article here). On that hillside I asked Paola what she is most afraid of in ageing. She did not hesitate:

The shepherds of this island spent months alone in the mountains with their flocks. Alone, she said, but never lonely, because:

“they knew at that time that there were a lot of people in the villages that they care about them.”

Being alone is a place. Being lonely is an absence.

The shepherds had the first and not the second.

Three months later, in Boston, on a walk through a cemetery he had chosen himself, Robert Waldinger told us what the Harvard Study of Adult Development had found. It has followed the same people for more than 85 years, the longest study of adult life ever run, and his team looked back at what predicts a happy, healthy eighty-year-old:

“And we thought it would be blood pressure or cholesterol level, but it wasn’t. It was how satisfied you were with your relationships.”

A Harvard professor and a guide in Sardinia, saying the same thing in two different languages.

Blue zone means family

When Alek asked her to define a blue zone, she did not talk about food or genes:

“But for me, as a native, Blue Zone means family.”

“I can find probably the same olive trees or whatever, but not the sense of community that I have here.”

The elders are not put aside here. They sit at the centre of every family:

“We involve them in every decision. If there is an important decision for the family, they are one of the first to know, and we care about what they think about it.”

She described the villages as one system: every family its own world, and all of them together.

“Imagine a galaxy with a lot of planet, like families, but we are part of the same system.”

In Okinawa we had seen elders looking after each other. In Sardinia they live inside the families. They are the blood of the village.

Our second blue zone

Sardinia was the second blue zone of our quest. I told Paola on that hillside why we had chosen these two:

“We decided to go Okinawa and Sardinia to see the happy people.”

In Okinawa, ten months earlier, we had planned a week and stayed a month. Before we went north to the centenarian village of Ogimi, our friend Tina Woods told us what to watch for, and it was exactly what we found again in Sardinia:

“They venerate their elders. Being older is actually considered valuable.”

Okinawa will get its own article. Until then, the whole month is on the Live Beyond Hub: Okinawa, a month in a blue zone.

The mindset

Paola put the attitude of the Sardinian elders in a few words:

“The mindset, especially the elders, are always positive because they grew up with basically nothing. Nothing.”

Paola Demurtas: “They’re always happy, and they are very active. This is the trick, I can say. Even mentally, they are always involved in something related to the family, some decisions, something manually to do.”

Alek: “So now I know a very important thing that they’re not only active physically, but also…”

Paola Demurtas: “Mentally, yeah.”

A year later, in Merano, in the Italian Alps, the longevity doctor Emanuele De Nobili, medical director of Villa Eden, gave us the same answer from the other end of Italy:

“It’s not a question of diet, as they say. It’s not a question of any supplement or physical activity, but it’s mostly because they are still social.”

The social part comes first. But these villages add something no gym can. They are built on steep hillsides, so every trip to the shop, to the church or to a neighbour is a climb. Nobody here calls it exercise. It is simply how you get anywhere, and the elders do it every day, even when they are very old. Paola told me not to be surprised by what we would see in the streets:

“You can see even strong, very old women just going for a walk up here.”

What the elders ate

The Sardinian diet has changed, Paola told me, and not for the better. In the past, meat was a luxury:

“In the past, to be honest, they didn’t eat so much meat. It could be, like, even sometimes twice a month.”

Two months before Sardinia, walking through Central Park in New York, I had asked Oz Garcia, one of New York’s top nutritionists and a biohacker, who became our friend on the quest, what way of eating would work best for most people. He pointed to the Mediterranean diet, and told us what it really is:

“When you combine those elements, what you find is a very rich assortment of vegetables, a very rich assortment of fruits, very low glycemic impact grains, high amounts of beans, which we now know have extraordinarily protective effects over the human heart.”

“So what you have is you have a highly complex, primarily plant-based way of eating with extremely healthy proteins.”

In New York it was advice. In Baunei it was simply what there was: meat as a luxury, and everything else from the land around the village.

Her own favourite is a local cheese, casu axedu, a kind of set, jelly-like milk the shepherds ate on their breaks, which she says is good for the gut.

Goats are everywhere in this story. I try not to drink cow’s milk, so when Paola showed us goat’s-milk ice cream in Baunei, I did not need to be asked twice. It was very good.

And that evening, down by the sea in Santa Maria Navarrese, the village held its goat festival. We thought the goat was the guest of honour. She was the dinner.

A message for my son’s generation

Alek was eighteen, and he had spent the whole year holding the camera and asking his own questions. (I have written about why I take my eighteen-year-old son to longevity clinics.) So I asked Paola:

“We always say that you have to start thinking about longevity not when you are 40 or 50, but when you’re a teenager. So what would be your message to the younger generation about their longevity?”

Treat your body as a temple, not a trash bin. That is the rule the quest taught me, and it is the first thing I tell anybody who asks me where to start. Paola began with exactly that, and then she took it further:

“Think about of the people that surrounds you, because your environment shape your life. So if you have good friends, you’re gonna be happy.”

“You don’t have to. You have the power to change your life if you want.”

Happy, even for a thousand years

I asked Paola how long she wants to live.

“As long as I’m happy, it doesn’t matter. If I’m not happy, I can die even tomorrow.”

I pushed her. A thousand years?

“If I’m happy, even 1,000 years. If I’m not happy, as my auntie said, if I’m not happy, why do I have to live longer?”

Under the tree

That afternoon Alek, who by then had been asking his own questions for a year, sat with Paola under a tree she had chosen herself, because the view was too beautiful not to film. They were not alone for long. The goats came to join them:

“They wanna join us.”

Then Alek asked her what science says about the blue zone. The first thing, she said, is stress:

Paola Demurtas: “The worst thing that you can do is stress your life.”

Alek: “Okay, so the biggest silent killer is stress.”

Paola Demurtas: “Yeah, it’s stress.”

The elders had hard lives, she said. They worried every day about how to feed their families. And yet their worries were simple:

“I remember I asked to a shepherd, ‘What was your biggest stress in life?’ And he told me, ‘Oh, losing a goat.’”

Less options, more health

As a teenager, Paola did not always love growing up here:

Paola Demurtas: “When I was younger, I was craving to go to fast food or, you know, to do something that I used to see on the television, but there was nothing around. So I ended up eating, like, healthy local thing that at that time for me was really boring. It was the only choice. And now I realize how lucky I was and I am now.”

Paola Demurtas: “We have few option. They are very natural and healthy, so that’s the trick.”

Alek: “Less options, more health.”

Paola Demurtas: “Yeah.”

Four words, and my son had summed up a whole library of research.

Watch, do not interview

Paola has one rule for visitors, and I have thought about it every time I have pointed a camera at an older person since:

“Just go there and try to observe them. That doesn’t mean that you have to kind of interrupt their life, like asking question all the time, like many people do here. Like, ‘What did you eat for lunch? What did you eat when you were young?’”

Nobody in these villages is doing longevity. There is no clinic and no protocol. There is a way of living together, and long lives come out of it.

Off camera

Sardinia was not only work. We went sailing with friends of mine on a trimaran, which was simply beautiful. The son of one of my best friends came with us to one of the villages and spent the day watching us work and learning about centenarians, the way Alek had been learning all year.

The next day we went where Paola told us we had to go: Orgosolo, a village whose walls are covered in murals. Alek is into street art, so he was in his element. Centenarian street art, we called it. Probably not painted by the centenarians, but painted right next to them.

The man who wanted another hundred years

At the end of that first day we sat with a group of elders outside the church in Baunei. They were watching the cars go by and were not in the least interested in being interesting.

One of them has stayed with me more than almost anyone we met that year. A week later, in the last days of the quest, at the Longevity Center in Warsaw, I was still telling the story, this time to Prince Michael von Liechtenstein:

“You know, exactly a week ago we were still in Sardinia and we met with local elderly people, 90-year-old and more. They were just sitting on one of the squares enjoying and watching the tourists go by. And I asked one of them, who was over 90, ‘Hey, would you like to get another 100 years?’ And he said, ‘If I will feel as good and strong as today, of course.’”

The Prince answered in one sentence that could hang over every village square in Sardinia:

“I think what we need in our societies anyway is more joy, and I think joy is also a very important contributor to health.”

I told the same story in Boston, to Robert Waldinger, and Alek summed it up better than I did:

Alek: “As long as you’re healthy, come on, why live shorter?”

Robert Waldinger: “That’s right.”

The elder in Baunei had old skin, and nothing else about him was old. He should be an inspiration to a lot of people, especially the young ones who tell me eighty is enough.

A little paradise

Another of the elders outside the church told me why he loves his village. He used to live by the sea, he said, and he got tired of it. Up here in the mountains, life is so much better. But the sea is ten minutes away, I said. No, no, he said. He lives in the mountains.

For him, those ten minutes were a border. His whole world was a few kilometres around his village: its square, its church, its people. The problems of the big world did not reach him there. It is a little paradise inside the big world, and a beautiful place to grow old. But for the rest of us it is not that easy to be detached from the world. We are part of it, and it is the whole world we need to change, not a few tiny corners of it. Paola knows how hard it is to carry that life anywhere else:

“It would be impossible today to replicate that life because you need to be isolated in the top of the mountain. So it’s not possible. But of course, we can take the best thing, learn something, and apply it to our modern life.”

This is one of the most important things our quest taught me. We should not copy the blue zones blindly. We should take from them everything we can: the family at the centre, the elders who still matter, the walk up the hill, the simple food, the joy. And then we should add what the modern world does brilliantly and they never had: good medicine, longevity medicine and longevity science. Connect those two, and we can build the true blue zones of the future. Not in a few mountain villages. Everywhere.

The wish

When we finished outside the church, I said the only thing that felt right:

“Anyway, gentlemen, thank you, for talking to us. And I wish you to live as long as possible and as joyful as possible.”

As long as possible, and as joyful as possible. I did not know it then, but that was the sentence I had crossed the world to find.

Your own table

A long life is built at a table, with people. If you want to start with yours, two things we made are free: the Longevity Calendar, which turns what we learned into your own week in four minutes, and the Longevity Map, the whole field on one page. And if you want to see where else this story took us, all 39 stops of the quest, Sardinia among them, are on the Quest Map, with the people we met at each one.

So, a simple question: how many people do you eat dinner with in a normal week?

Next week: a living room in Singapore, and the four words one of the world’s leading longevity clinicians used to stop me mid-sentence.

Marek Piotrowski, Longevity Advocate ↗

Marek and Paola Demurtas on the hillside near Baunei, Sardinia, August 2024. · Live Beyond
Where each quotation comes from. Paola Demurtas, walking with Marek near Baunei, August 2024. Paola Demurtas, interviewed by Aleksander under the tree, August 2024. Marek with the elders of Baunei, August 2024. Robert Waldinger and Aleksander, Boston, November 2024. Tina Woods, Okinawa, October 2023. Emanuele De Nobili, Merano, July 2025. Oz Garcia, Central Park, New York, June 2024. Marek and Prince Michael von Liechtenstein, Warsaw, September 2024.