5 Strangely Common Causes of Death
When it comes to when you leave this mortal coil, in most circumstances, you have limited control. The same applies to how, exactly, you wrap things up. If you do picture it, though, that mental image probably falls into one of two categories: 1) likely but boring; or 2) unlikely but pretty exciting. The former are things like heart disease or stroke. The latter are things like shark attacks or lightning strikes.
But there are a couple final moments that a surprising amount of people succumb to each year. Unusual deaths that, at the very least, are more likely than the aforementioned lightning strike or shark-eating.
Crushed By A Vending Machine
Shutterstock
Next time your Snickers gets caught on a candy machine’s steel spiral dispenser, take the L. If you choose to try to shake that sucker loose instead? It could be the most expensive snack of your life. Your brain may tell you that simple physics can reward you with the treat you paid for, but those same physics apply to the whole machine, not just the contents.
The amount of people, on average, killed by a vending machine each year does not equal zero, even rounding down. From the roughly three-decade span that is 1978 to 1995, 37 people were killed by a falling vending machine.
Crushed By A Television
Shutterstock
Again, it’s not a great idea to test gravity with consumer-facing (both businesswise and physically) electronics. You have to think the risk of this is lower these days, given that a grid of LEDs provides a lot less crushing force than a cathode-ray tube, but at one point, belly-flopping boob tubes were taking a non-insignificant amount of people out. For example, in 2011, 41 people died to a tipped TV, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Non-mortal injuries are much higher, with 18,000 television-tip maladies occurring per year. Sadly, the deaths behind this statistic skew heavily younger. So if your little one loves to sit cross-legged directly under your self-mounted television to search every possible pixel of Dora the Explorer for signs of Swiper? Maybe urge them to join you on the couch.
Mauled By A Lawnmower
Shutterstock
Mowing the lawn is so inherently, deeply boring that it’s easy to forget the mechanism which performs that task is a whirling set of blades. All in all, the whole thing seems a little much for chopping up stalks of grass. What are we, trying to instill fear in the rest of the lawn, lest that grass grow long itself? As you can imagine, all it takes is those blades being somewhere they shouldn’t to send a hapless groundskeeper or shorts-clad dad to the Sea of Reeds.
The annual death count racked up by the humble lawnmower? Ninety human lives.
Choked Out By Autoerotic Asphyxiation
Shutterstock
Some people might argue that the word “accident” is generous here, but those prudes need to take into account intent. Just because it’s a dangerous activity doesn’t mean death is an acceptable result. If someone wants to eat possibly poisonous pufferfish for lunch every day of his life? It’s risky, but who am I to tell another person what they’re supposed to eat? If they ever get an unfortunately unclean fugu fillet, just because there probably won’t be an investigation into foul play doesn’t mean it wasn’t an accident. Anyways, if you like to get choked at the same time as your chicken, be careful: Statistics show close to 160 people a year bid adieu in that manner.
Overswoled by Exercise
Shutterstock
Now this, I’m not personally worried about. But if you, unlike me, aren’t an enjoyer of the process of muscular atrophy, be careful how hard you push yourself. You don’t want to fill your drawers and collapse next to the tire you just flipped at CrossFit.
Specifically, intense aerobic athletes do have a real risk of death if they push themselves too hard. Among men who exercise “vigorously” for more than 140 minutes a week, 1 in 13,000 of them will die during their workout. That’s higher than both men who exercise vigorously for 20 to 139 minutes a week (1 in 23,000) and those who only exercise 1 to 19 minutes a week (1 in 17,000).
You heard it here, folks: never leave a resting heart rate. After all, everyone likes resting, why wouldn’t your heart?
