longevity Archives | Neel Burton

The Answer May Be to Become a Monk

Harvest at the Abbaye de Lérins, on an island opposite Cannes, c. 1900.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Recently, I decided to get in touch with a childhood friend. We hadn’t spoken in twenty-five years.

He wasn’t just any childhood friend. We were born on the same day, in the same town, one hour apart. We used to joke that we were twins from different mothers.

In the intervening years, he had become a Trappist monk: a strict kind of monk who practises deep silence and speaks only when necessary. I write him long, flowing letters; he replies laconically, but touchingly.

His life is austere. Every morning, he wakes up at 3:30 to pray. And yet I find myself envying something in it: its simplicity, its mindfulness, and its constant, if mostly silent, companionship.

My twin brother got me thinking about the monastic life. As I researched, I found something most astonishing: If you are poor and uneducated, you may be able to enjoy the same health outcomes and life expectancy as the richest and most educated… simply by becoming a monk or nun.

This remarkable fact ought to be better known, and probably would be if it did not sit so uneasily with our cut-throat consumerist society.

The Price of Inequality

A major American study found that, at age 40, the richest 1 per cent of men could expect to live 14.8 years longer than the poorest 1 per cent. For women, the gap was 10.6 years.

The inequality is not just in how long people live, but how well. In England, people born in the most deprived areas in 2018-20 could expect nearly twenty fewer years in good health than those born in the least deprived areas: 19.3 fewer years for women, and 18.6 for men.

In a monastery, these inequalities simply vanish. A 2025 study followed 2,421 German Catholic monks born between 1840 and 1959. The researchers used the order’s titles “brother” and “padre” as indicators of socioeconomic status, with brothers often engaged in manual labour and the better-educated padres holding senior administrative posts. Across the different birth cohorts, they found no statistically significant survival difference between the two groups.

The contrast is all the more striking because monks appear not only to escape the inequality between rich and poor, but also to live unusually long lives. A study of Bavarian religious communities found that young adult monks could expect to live up to four years longer than other men. A Korean study analysing newspaper death notices across occupational groups between 1963 and 2010 found that clergy, including Buddhist monks, had the highest reported average age at death, at about 80.

Cloistered life reduces inequality not just between rich and poor, but also between men and women. A girl born in America in 2024 could expect to live 4.9 years longer than her male counterpart. By contrast, a study of Bavarian religious communities found that nuns’ life expectancy exceeded monks’ by only about one year.

A Different Way to Live

What might explain this all-round levelling effect? In a monastery, many of the things that make life better and safer are shared. Monks eat together, live under the same roof, follow a common routine, and receive the same care.

The monastery also offers something harder to measure: a place within a community, useful work, and a strong sense of purpose. Its members have a role and a status, but little of the competition that governs life outside. They have peace and quiet without being alone. Even death belongs to a shared—and continuing—story.

The implication that you can “win at life” simply by stepping out of the rat race is, of course, deeply disturbing. Our society assumes that income and education represent genuine advantages. But the monastery suggests that they matter partly because the world outside is insecure, competitive, and unequal. Once people share the same housing, food, healthcare, community, and purpose, much of the advantage of wealth and education simply disappears.

I think of my friend waking up at 3:30 to pray and chant. His life is austere, but far from empty. Perhaps that is what I envy: not the silence alone, but the sense that a life can be rich—in fact, far richer—without being organised around acquisition, comparison, and the fear of falling behind.