What if, instead of waiting to discover the next Blue Zone, we deliberately designed one?
I have become slightly obsessed with a question that is either wonderfully ambitious or completely unreasonable. Quite possibly both.
Could Park City become America’s first intentionally designed modern Blue Zone?
I’m using “modern Blue Zone” here as an aspiration, not an official designation. Traditional Blue Zones became famous because researchers looked backwards and identified communities where people appeared to live unusually long and healthy lives. The interesting part was never simply that people reached an impressive age. It was how they lived on the way there. Movement tended to be woven into daily life rather than squeezed into a forty-five-minute appointment with a treadmill. Food was generally simpler, social connections stronger, and people often lived in environments where many healthy behaviours happened naturally rather than requiring heroic amounts of discipline.
The science around exactly why these populations live longer is more nuanced than the popular Blue Zones story sometimes suggests, and I think that is worth acknowledging. But the broader question remains fascinating: how much of healthy longevity is shaped not simply by the choices we make, but by the environment in which those choices are made?
My question is slightly different. Rather than waiting fifty years and hoping we discover that Park City accidentally became healthier, why wouldn’t we try to design for it now?
That idea connects directly to my own slightly eccentric ambition to ski and play tennis on my hundredth birthday. The more I have thought about what would need to be true for me to do that, the more obvious it has become that my health will not be determined purely by what happens inside a clinic. Of course medical care matters, as do exercise, nutrition, sleep and all the other things we now spend so much time measuring. But my chances of remaining capable at one hundred will also be influenced by the home I live in, the food available to me, how easily I can move around my community, whether I remain socially connected, whether I still have purpose and whether the environment around me makes healthy decisions easier or harder.
That was an important shift in my thinking. Longevity is normally presented as an individual project. We tell people to exercise more, sleep better, eat differently, manage their stress and build more meaningful relationships. All perfectly sensible advice. The slight inconvenience is that we then send them back into environments that often make every one of those things more difficult.
We tell people to move more, then build communities where a car is required for almost everything. We tell them to eat better, then surround them with highly convenient food that has been engineered for almost every objective other than health. We tell them relationships and community matter, then increasingly design homes and lifestyles around isolation and convenience. We tell people to sleep better while filling their evenings with artificial light, screens, stress and environments that are not particularly good at helping the body switch off.
Then we seem surprised when willpower eventually loses.
I think that is backwards.
One of the recurring lessons of my career has been that behaviour is heavily influenced by systems. When I was building technology companies, we never assumed users would consistently overcome a badly designed product simply because we told them it was in their best interest. We tried to make the useful behaviour easier, the experience clearer and the feedback faster.
Health should be no different. If we genuinely want healthier populations, we cannot put the entire burden on individual discipline. We need to design healthier defaults.
That is why Park City interests me so much.
I live in a place where movement is already woven into the culture. People ski, hike, bike, walk, train and spend time outdoors because that is part of why many of us chose to live here in the first place. There is a strong connection to the mountains and, perhaps more importantly, a community that already places a high value on living well.
But being an active mountain town is not the same thing as being a truly healthy community. You can exercise five times a week and still sleep badly. You can ski all winter and still eat poorly. You can live surrounded by extraordinary natural beauty and still feel lonely. You can have access to some of the best healthcare and wellness technology available and still have very little idea how all the pieces fit together.
That is why I think the opportunity is much bigger than adding another longevity clinic, wellness centre or healthy restaurant. The more interesting question is whether health can become part of the infrastructure of the community itself.
What would happen if homes were designed around better air, water, light, sleep and recovery as naturally as they are currently designed around kitchens and bathrooms? What if proactive health services were easier to access before something went wrong? What if nutrition, movement and recovery were integrated into everyday life rather than treated as separate industries? What if people owned and understood more of their health data? What if social connection and purpose were regarded as seriously as another piece of fitness equipment?
None of these ideas is particularly revolutionary on its own. The opportunity lies in connecting them.
That distinction matters to me because the wellness industry has become very good at creating amenities. Put in a cold plunge, an infrared sauna and a meditation room and, apparently, we have built a longevity experience. I like all three, but I am not convinced a collection of expensive equipment constitutes a health strategy.
The same problem exists in real estate. Health is increasingly being used as a selling point, particularly at the premium end of the market. Again, I think that is broadly positive. But if healthy real estate becomes another luxury amenity available only to people who can afford the most expensive homes, we will have missed a much larger opportunity.
A truly modern Blue Zone cannot be a private club. It has to become increasingly useful to the whole community.
That does not mean everybody needs the same services or that every intervention needs to be delivered by one company. In fact, I think the opposite is true. The healthiest version of this idea would involve residents, healthcare providers, restaurants, schools, employers, developers, local government, community groups and entrepreneurs all contributing different pieces.
My interest is in the operating system connecting them.
Over the years, I have built businesses in technology, marketing, healthcare and community, and the industries may look different but the recurring problem is remarkably similar. We create lots of individual solutions and then leave the consumer to figure out how they fit together.
Health has become a particularly good example. We have one app for sleep, another for exercise, a wearable measuring recovery, a blood test measuring biomarkers, a doctor looking at disease risk, a trainer thinking about strength, a nutritionist thinking about food and perhaps a therapist thinking about emotional health. Each may be doing excellent work. The person in the middle is expected to somehow become the systems integrator.
That is difficult enough for an individual. Now imagine trying to do it for an entire community.
That challenge is one of the reasons I am building Argentis, but I am very conscious that Argentis cannot and should not be the Park City Blue Zone. It can contribute infrastructure, ideas, experiments and services, but the mission has to be bigger than any one company. If it becomes proprietary, it has failed before it has started.
I see Park City as a twenty-year experiment in a much bigger question: can we deliberately create a community where the healthier choice gradually becomes the easier, more enjoyable and more socially normal choice?
That is quite different from telling everyone what to do. I have never found being lectured particularly motivating, and I doubt I’m alone. The more interesting approach is to change the environment around the decision.
If walking somewhere is pleasant and convenient, more people are likely to walk. If healthy food tastes good and is easy to access, eating well becomes easier. If homes are designed to support better sleep, sleep stops being entirely dependent on discipline. If exercise is social and enjoyable, movement becomes part of life rather than another task on the calendar. If people feel connected to others and useful to their community, purpose becomes something lived rather than something discussed in a wellness seminar.
None of this removes personal responsibility. Quite the opposite. Agency matters enormously, but good systems help people exercise that agency more successfully.
There is another reason I think Park City is an unusually interesting place to attempt this. It is small enough that experiments can be visible, relationships can form and ideas can spread, yet connected enough to attract entrepreneurs, researchers, athletes, investors, healthcare leaders and people from around the world who are already interested in these questions.
It could become a laboratory, in the best sense of the word.
Not a laboratory where residents are treated as test subjects, but a place where we can try things, measure what works, admit when something doesn’t and improve. That last part is particularly important. I am not interested in announcing that we have solved longevity. I have spent enough time building companies to know how dangerous it is to confuse a vision with a finished product. Some experiments will work. Others won’t. Some of the ideas we are excited about today will probably look rather silly in ten years.
Good. That is what learning looks like.
The ambition should not be perfection. It should be progress that can be measured honestly over decades. I would like us to look at movement, metabolic health, sleep, nutrition, social connection, mental wellbeing, environmental quality, accessibility, purpose and ultimately healthy years lived. I would like us to ask whether the community is becoming more capable, not simply wealthier or more technologically advanced.
And I would like us to publish what we learn, including the mistakes, because the interesting question is not ultimately whether Park City becomes healthier. It is whether what we learn here can help other communities become healthier too.
That is where this idea becomes much bigger than Park City.
Around the world, we spend extraordinary amounts of money dealing with chronic disease once it has already emerged. At the same time, many of the environments in which people spend their lives quietly encourage behaviours that work against long-term health. We can continue building increasingly sophisticated ways of dealing with the consequences, but at some point we also have to move further upstream.
We cannot clinic our way out of that problem.
Health has to move into our homes, our streets, our food systems, our workplaces and our communities. That is what a modern Blue Zone means to me. Not trying to reproduce the past, and certainly not pretending that we already know all the answers, but taking what we have learned about human health and asking how it should influence the places we build next.
Perhaps Park City will succeed. Perhaps we will discover that some of our assumptions were wrong. Most likely, both will happen. Either way, I think the experiment is worth attempting.
My own measure of success remains wonderfully simple. Fifty years from now, I would like to stand at the top of a mountain with skis on my feet and enough energy to actually enjoy the way down.
But I don’t particularly want to be there alone.
If we do this properly, perhaps there will be a lot of us.
The Bigger Question
We already know that where we live influences how we move, eat, sleep, connect and age. So if our environment is going to shape our health anyway, why wouldn’t we design it to do a better job?
Building a healthier community takes a community.
If you’re working on an idea that could help Park City become a healthier place to live, I’d like to hear about it.
Share an Idea → ideas@argentis.com
Blue Zones® is a trademark of Blue Zones, LLC. My use of “modern Blue Zone” describes an independent vision for intentionally designing healthier communities and does not imply an official Blue Zones designation or affiliation.
