What a waitress in Holbox taught me about Death

Originally shared in Tuesday Notes on September 8, 2026.

I've been quiet here for a few weeks, taking a longer break from Tuesday Notes over the summer, on purpose, to actually be on holiday instead of writing about being on holiday. It turned out to be exactly the kind of recharge I needed, and I'm back with a lot to unpack.

I landed home in Zurich on Sunday and the flight back felt heavy and light at the same time. Heavy because I was leaving "home," the person I am there, the country, my friends. Light because of a few epiphanies I had along the way (more on those soon). This was one of the best holidays of my life, not because any single day was perfect, but because of how different each stretch of it was from the last.

I spent the first week on my own, visiting two childhood friends, then went to San Miguel de Allende on a girls' trip to celebrate one of their 40th birthdays. Back in Mexico City my boyfriend arrived and I got to show him the sights that matter most to me in that city, then we celebrated my friend's birthday properly with her friends and family. We closed the trip with almost a week in Holbox, relaxing, touring the islands, swimming with whale sharks, living alongside the raccoon population that seems to run the place.

One of the moments that's stayed with me happened at a restaurant during dinner. My boyfriend asked our waitress, out of practical curiosity, where the nearest hospital was and what people do when they get sick. She told him it's a thirty minute ferry plus a two hour drive away, unless it's urgent, in which case you get picked up by helicopter. Then, almost as an afterthought, she said she genuinely struggled to remember the last person who had died on the island in the past twenty years since she had moved there from another state in Mexico.

Holbox has fewer than two thousand inhabitants, so what she was really telling us is that in a community small enough that everyone knows everyone, death by illness is rare enough to be hard to recall. Cancer, she said, doesn't really happen there.

Cancer, she said, doesn't really happen there.

I haven't been able to shake this comment since. Lately, the word cancer has felt omnipresent for me, concentrated painfully into the last couple of months, through people I knew personally and people one step removed through my circle of friends. The contrast between her sentence and my last few months couldn't have been sharper.

A 2017 study published in The Lancet found that the Tsimane, a forager-horticulturalist population in the Bolivian Amazon, have the lowest levels of coronary artery disease ever recorded in a studied population, five times lower than in the United States. The Tsimane also showed extremely low rates of hypertension, high cholesterol, and diabetes, despite living without modern medicine, refined food, or a sedentary routine. The researchers proposed something quietly radical: they argued that walking away from a subsistence lifestyle, living directly off hunting, fishing and farming rather than buying food produced elsewhere, is in itself a new risk factor for heart disease, one which modern medicine doesn't screen for.

It's not just the amazon. Researcher Dan Buettner and demographers Michel Poulain and Gianni Pes identified Nicoya, a peninsula in Costa Rica, as one of the world's five "blue zones," places with an unusual concentration of people living past 100 (Buettner also made the Netflix documentary "Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones," which is absolutely worth watching if you want to dive a bit deeper into this). Nicoyans describe something they call "plan de vida," a reason to live that keeps elders active and gives their days a sense of purpose. They also talk about surrounding themselves with the "right tribe," close-knit people who reinforce, rather than erode, wellbeing.

Here's the part that actually stopped me. In our society, we have access to the best hospitals and the most advanced medical care in human history. And we need it more, because we're also getting sicker, more often and more gravely. We spend decades running ourselves into the ground in stressful jobs, quietly enduring, telling ourselves we're building toward a retirement where we'll finally have the health and the money to enjoy life and relax. Holbox and Nicoya have none of that infrastructure or financial wealth. They don't have it because, for the most part, they don't need it. They're already healthier and more fulfilled than we are, long before anyone gets close to a hospital.

They're already healthier and more fulfilled than we are, long before anyone gets close to a hospital.

So this begs the question: what are we actually optimizing for in our society?

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Brain snack:

The Tsimane study's senior author, anthropologist Hillard Kaplan, pointed out something easy to miss: the Tsimane carry a high infectious disease burden and still have close to none of the heart disease we do. The danger, in other words, isn't germs or a lack of hospitals. It's the accumulation of things we've normalized: chronic stress, processed food, sitting still, isolation from purpose and from each other.

If that's true, the fix isn't a supplement or a biohack. It's closer to building a plan de vida of your own, right where you already are, instead of postponing living until retirement finally arrives.

Reply and tell me: if you built your own plan de vida today, what would be the one thing in it you'd stop postponing?

Big hug, Claudia ✨