Swimming pool drowning deaths in the US

As Americans have poured increasingly large sums of money into the business of finding someone to love them, they have simultaneously and with considerable coordination stopped drowning in swimming pools. The implication—that loneliness was somehow keeping people underwater—is too poetic to be true and too statistically robust to ignore entirely. One wonders if Hinge has considered adding "pool safety advocate" to its list of marketable features.

What we are actually witnessing is two trends that happen to be on opposite trajectories during the same 17-year window. Online dating revenue has climbed steadily as smartphones became ubiquitous and the stigma around meeting strangers on the internet evaporated—the industry grew from roughly 1.5 billion dollars in 2005 to over 5 billion by 2021. Swimming pool drownings, meanwhile, have declined as safety regulations improved, pool fencing became standard in new construction, and a generation of parents who grew up watching PSAs about water safety began supervising their children with the anxious intensity of air traffic controllers. Both trends are real, both are driven by technology and cultural change, and neither has the slightest thing to do with the other.

We live in an age where finding a date and surviving a swim have both gotten statistically easier, which is either a sign of progress or a coincidence so perfect it feels like progress. The correlation tells us nothing about love or water, but it tells us something about how readily we mistake two lines crossing on a chart for meaning. Swipe left on causation.