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The cool thing about YouTube is that I really get to know my audience.
YouTube is always sending me these amazing statistics, like, “Sam, your average viewer
is 88% cooler and better looking that the average Legal Eagle viewer,” or “Sam,
your average viewer sends you 3% less hate mail than the average Legal Eagle viewer,”
or “Sam, your average viewer is going to die on January 1st, 2075, at exactly 11am.”
Isn’t that awesome?
Wait, what?
It’s creepy?
It’s creepy for me to tell my viewers when they’re going to die?
Well, maybe it would be a little less creepy if I explained why.
Of course, estimating the year of someone’s death is simple enough — my average viewer
is about 25 and has roughly 54 more years to live—but how can you know which day out
of any given year is the one that’s going to be the deadliest?
Well, it turns out, there’s actually a pretty consistent answer.
Back in 2010, sociologist David Phillips compiled 57 million death certificates, ranging from
1979 to 2004, and noticed something interesting: at least in the United States, there’s a
noticeable spike in deaths at the end of every single year, and it always peaks exactly on
New Year’s Day.
At first, the explanation seems pretty simple: there are more people drinking champagne,
more people lighting their roof on fire with bootleg fireworks, and more people driving
down residential streets at 150 miles an hour because they lit their friend’s roof on
fire with bootleg fireworks.
But here’s the catch: this pattern holds, even if you’re only counting deaths due
to natural causes, like heart attacks or pneumonia.
So, maybe, it has something to do with the colder weather—after all, natural deaths
do tend to increase in the colder months and decrease when it gets warmer.
But yet again, even when looking at deaths from perpetually-warm climates, the New Year’s
Day spike remains.
“Well,” you might be thinking, “Last New Year’s I spent the whole day thinking
about how I’ve been wearing the same sweatpants since the New Year’s before, and the stress
of that nearly killed me.”
And yeah, Phillips does acknowledge that stress levels are heightened on holidays like New
Year’s and Christmas… but he also points out that there’s no evidence that it’s
actually killing people, at least in numbers this large.
So what makes New Year’s Day so deadly?
Well, there seem to be two main theories: the first is that people simply don’t like
going to the hospital during major holidays—like, say you’re at a party where you might get
a kiss from a mysterious stranger at midnight, but you also might currently be having a heart
attack… better to play it safe and just stay at the party.
This is why you see spikes on other holidays, too, with Christmas being a close runner-up.
The other theory has something to do with the way that hospitals operate: generally
speaking, hospital mortality rates are slightly higher—by just a few percentage points—during
public holidays, because there are fewer staff on call, and test results can be delayed by
a few more days.
The same principle has been shown to apply to weekends, and, in some hospitals, July
1st: the day that many new medical students start their real-world practice, where they
have about a 10% higher chance of slipping up with a fatal medication error.
But let’s say you’re a strong, healthy, strapping young YouTube viewer, and you’re
not really concerned about dying of old age, at least not yet.
Well, unfortunately, there are still a few days you should watch out for.
If you’re not the greatest driver, you might want to stay off the roads on August 2nd—that’s
the day, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, that the most fatal car
crashes occur, owing to an increased volume of traffic and longer travel times as people
head to the beach, or the lake, or the haunted amusement park, or wherever they spend their
summer vacations.
If you’re okay at driving but you’re just generally unlikable, then you should really
avoid that New Year’s party, cause… that’s also the day you’re most likely to be murdered,
followed by the 4th of July, and then Christmas.
You might also want to stay home on Sundays, which have a 20-30% higher homicide rate than
weekdays, because, I guess, all the serial killers are busy churning out educational
YouTube content.
So, let’s say one of these fatal days rolls around… is there any way to know what time
of day you’re most likely to keel over?
Well, it turns out that there is, and it has to do with your DNA.
You see, there’s a single nucleotide polymorphism—meaning a single base pair in your DNA sequence that
can vary from person to person—that helps inform your circadian rhythms.
This sequence can either be AA, AG, or GG, and people in the AA group tend to have biological
clocks that run just a little bit faster than the GG group, resulting in naturally earlier
wake-up times by about an hour or so.
The thing is, your circadian rhythm also regulates things like hormone releases, body temperature,
and blood pressure, and all of these factors play a part in potentially fatal events, like
strokes or heart attacks.
Because of the way that the timing works out, people in the AA and AG group are most likely
to experience a natural death at about 11 am, and people in the GG group are most likely
to experience one at about 6pm.
So the next time the clock strikes 11 on January 1st, brace yourself… or, just, like, go
to the hospital if you’re having a heart attack.
Of course the best way to not be forced to decide between a midnight kiss and a deadly
heart attack is to not have a heart attack in the first place, and one way to do that
is to eat right.
You see, I used to be a take-out addict—I didn’t really have the time to go shopping
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