Furniture and TV tip-over deaths

It turns out that furniture and televisions, those pillars of domestic stability upon which we've built our entire concept of relaxation, have decided to fail us in perfect synchronisation for the past two decades. When one tips over and kills someone, the others seem to tip over and merely injure someone else, like a coordinated malfunction in the universe's inventory management system. This is not a coincidence so much as evidence that inanimate objects have agreed on a schedule.

Here the confounder is both obvious and unusually literal: the 2020 lockdowns put families indoors for unprecedented stretches, buying new WFH furniture and spending whole days within arm's reach of it. Both the deaths and the emergency visits rose in parallel because they measure the same thing at different severities — a country spending more hours near its dressers than it ever had before.

We are pattern-recognition machines haunted by the suspicion that our patterns mean something when mostly they just mean we're all buying the same poorly-engineered things and arranging them identically. The data tells us what happened, not why it mattered. We still don't secure our televisions to walls.