Deaths from falling out of bed in the US

It is a curious feature of the universe that Americans have somehow managed to synchronise their tumbles from mattresses with their enthusiasm for circular bread topped with cheese, as if the cosmos were operating on a single thermostat labeled 'misadventure and carbohydrates.' Between 2005 and 2021, these two entirely unrelated phenomena—one involving gravity, one involving yeast—moved together with the kind of perfect coordination you'd expect from a choreographed dance, except nobody was choreographing anything. We simply fell out of bed more often as we spent more money on pizza. Which is to say, we did both.

The obvious culprit is population growth, that great amplifier of all human activity, which expanded steadily across those seventeen years and would happily explain why more people died from bed accidents while simultaneously more people were eating pizza. But there's something deeper happening here: the economic cycles that made Americans either confident enough to order delivery or depressed enough to eat at home, which turns out to be the same emotional state. Between 2005 and 2021, the American population grew by roughly thirty million people—that's equivalent to adding the entire population of Texas to the country—and all thirty million of them, it seems, were either falling out of bed or ordering pepperoni, often both.

We are pattern-seeking creatures living in a cosmos that contains far more patterns than patterns, which makes exercises like these both entirely meaningless and impossible to stop thinking about once you've started. The real mystery isn't why bed deaths and pizza spending moved together, but why we expected them not to. In a country doing anything at all, everything correlates with everything else.