STUDYING YOUR LIFESPAN ON THE EAST END

By David Lion Rattiner

A new study by Harvard researchers about life expectancy has some very interesting information when it comes to men and women who visit the East End during the summer. The study explains the dramatic differences in life expectancy in the United States and suggests that where you live has a lot to do with how long you live. For example, if you live in Hawaii, you have a life expectancy of about 80 years, whereas if you live in Washington D.C. you have an average life span of 72 years. The people in Hawaii are not richer, they don’t have better health care, there must be something different in the way that they are living that has to do with where they live. Surfing perhaps?

What caught our eye here at Dan’s Papers was when the study was broken down in New York State and even more specifically, into groups of men and women. Manhattan men live to about 74.6 years of age while Manhattan women live to be 81 on average. East End men live to be about 75.5 years of age, almost a year more then a Manhattan man. An East End woman, however, is just the opposite. She lives to be just 80.1 years old, almost an entire year less!

And so, by the logic of this Harvard study, you can logically say that it is healthy for a man to come visit the East End all summer long. In fact, he should be coming out here every weekend in the fall, winter and spring as well. We crunched some numbers here and determined that if a man from Manhattan is able to visit the East End three days a week during the summer season and three times a month the rest of the year, he will live, on average, three months, sixteen days, six hours and exactly fourteen minutes longer then he would have if he just lived in Manhattan. That number shoots up to four months, eighteen days, eleven hours and ten minutes if he is able to spend the entire summer season out in the East End. That’s almost five more months of life to enjoy if you think about it.

On the other end of this are the women. Going by the same math, we determined that women who visit the East End on weekends only and three times a month throughout the year will actually live three months, eight days, four hours and forty-three minutes less. If they spend even more time out here, that number climbs to four months, eight days, two hours and twenty-one minutes.

Women however, still get to win either way, because they live about six years longer then a man in almost any situation. Why do women live shorter lives out on the East End in comparison to Manhattan? Well, it’s pretty obvious. Women get stressed out when they come out here. They have to get all dressed up for parties, they have to deal with the traffic, they have to get their hair done, they have to work on their tans. Not much relaxing is going on for the most part. Sure you have spa treatments and things like that, but they are doing that kind of stuff in the city too.

Men are a different story. Men on the East End are like vegetables. They are the laziest, most relaxed, most in-their-element creatures that you’ll ever see. When a man goes to a party on the East End, you’ll catch him in shorts, flip flops and a polo shirt. He fishes or sails all day, he surfs all day, he sleeps until noon and the worst thing that can possibly be wrong in his life at that moment is that he dinged his longboard. He doesn’t eat any fast food that is so readily available to him in the city either. He eats fresh fish with corn. Clams on the half shell and light, summer beer.

So guys, if you want to live longer, come out to the old summer shack for a little down time. Go fishing, go surfing and don’t worry about fiddling with your tie in the morning. You are actually doing all things right by your body.

Ladies? I’m sorry to say that you need to either stay in Manhattan or stop getting so stressed out when you come out to visit your country home. Also, lay off the cosmos.