Surveys show that most people want to die “quickly, in their sleep, and without notice”
but the odds of that happening for you are incredibly low.
So, when the time comes, how are you most likely to die?
In 1901 the average life expectancy of humans was 31 years old, and in just over 100 years
that average has gone up to 71.
If you live in a developed nation like France or Canada, you’ll likely liver closer to
82, while developing or majority world countries like Rwanda age to 64 on average.
And many of these people die in weird ways, including 27 people from selfie-related accidents
in 2015.
One man died of heart failure and exhaustion after playing Starcraft for 50 hours on end,
and annually 100 people die in Russia from falling icicles.
Not to mention about 70 children will choke to death on hot dogs every year.
But if we use the United States as an example of the western world, we had over 318 million
people living in 2014, of which more than 2.6 million died.
Almost half of these people died of heart disease or cancer, which is much different
than 100 years ago when most people died from tuberculosis and influenza.
Scientific advancements such as antibiotics and vaccines have allowed us to die less often
of the flu or TB, and even decreased how often we die of cancer.
In the 1970’s the survival rate from cancer was only 50% - today that has increased to
68% with 15.5 million cancer survivors alive in the US today.
Thanks SCIENCE!
Unfortunately both heart disease and cancer aren’t ‘sudden killers’ and involve
mostly long, drawn out deaths.
In fact, 60% of deaths in hospital are attributed to one of these, with 1 in 10 of those individuals
being in a hospital for a month or more.
Of course, sudden deaths do happen, with 136,053 people dying of unintentional injuries or
accidents in 2014, in the US.
The media can also affect our fear and anxiety of death from strange causes.
After all, not one person died of a shark attack in the US during 2014, but 38 people
were killed by dogs that year.
Many fear biking within a city, but you’re more likely to die walking as a pedestrian,
with 6,200 pedestrians killed, and only 900 killed in bike accidents.
For every 1 person that dies in a terrorist attack, 80 will die from alcoholism.
In fact, a majority of terrorist activity in the west is caused by lone wolf attackers,
of which 80% were not islamic fundamentalists, but instead political extremists, nationalist,
racial and religious supremacists.
On a worldwide scale in 2015, 78% of all terrorists deaths occurred in just five countries: Afghanistan,
Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan and Syria.
Where you live has a big impact on how you’re likely to die too; in the 34 poorest countries
you’re mostly likely to die of respiratory problems - not from cigarettes, but from ingesting
smoke while cooking.
Females in Japan are less likely to die of heart disease, and live to 87 years old on
average, compared to 80 years old for American females.
This is often attributed to the Japanese diet.
In the future, we will likely not only live longer, but potentially know exactly how and
when we’ll die.
In fact, a recent computer software has been developed that has been shown to estimate
how and when you will die with 96% accuracy, based on medical history, lifestyle and many
other factors.
The question is - do you want to know how and when you’ll die?
Let us know in the comments below.
You can also find out the Top 5 Regrets People Have Before Dying in our AsapTHOUGHT video.
Link in the description for that video.
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