Swiss Radio interview
I was recently interviewed on Swiss radio about my thoughts on Swiss life.
“If you remove all difficulty and challenge from your life, if you go into a world of total comfort and total luxury, you’ve also entered the realm of total decay. One of the things I like about the Swiss is, they work really hard, and they take care of themselves with a real sense of personal and community responsibility. If you look at a check-list of how to live well and live long, like one of those Blue Zones lists, people here naturally live like that. It’s community, it’s a sense of purpose, diet, exercise. I mean you guys already know it. It’s like intrinsic to you guys.”
“I don’t think it’s a pan-European thing, I think it’s a particular Swiss way of living. It’s a certain set of values that people have here, and an outlook at life. And I think that that something can be learned by anyone. Here, the sense of community here, which is very powerful, is something you don’t have in a lot of Anglo cultures.”
One can fault the Swiss on a lot of things- being uptight, weird language, cuckoo clocks- but as far as a culture that lives the AGEIST values of learning, health, community and purpose, they are really an astonishing culture. And don’t even get me started on how envious I am of their governing systems.
