Deaths from falling out of bed in the US

It turns out that Americans have been falling out of bed with increasingly elaborate precision, their tumbles rising and falling in perfect synchronisation with the installation of electric vehicle charging stations, as though each socket punched into a wall somewhere in Ohio required a compensatory elderly person to miss their mattress edge in Florida. One might almost suspect that EV chargers are somehow reaching backward through time to destabilise sleeping arrangements, which would at least explain why the universe bothers keeping score on both. But it's probably just that we're very good at finding dances where none were invited.

What's almost certainly happening here is that both metrics track the same underlying current: a country getting wealthier, more urban, and slightly older all at once. Between 2010 and 2021, America's population aged noticeably—the median age crept up from about 37 to 38.1 years—while simultaneously, the push for EV infrastructure accelerated with policy incentives and genuine climate anxiety, particularly after 2015. Bed-related deaths are one of those hidden epidemiological facts that most people don't think about until they see the number, which is actually several thousand per year in the US; the ageing population falling out of bed is just as natural a consequence of demographics as the young and urban installing charging stations in converted parking lots.

The real story isn't that electric cars are killing people in their sleep, though we understand why your brain briefly considered the possibility. Rather, both trends are passengers on the same slow-moving vehicle—call it demographic inevitability, or economic development, or simply the fact that large countries change in many ways at once. When you line up enough numbers, some of them will dance together for a while. Most of them mean nothing at all.