When Clarissa Dalloway thinks that it’s “very, very dangerous to live even one day,” what, exactly, does she have in mind? She’s probably contemplating something abstract—the passage of time, the obscurity of fate. She isn’t worried about stumbling over her own feet and careening into London traffic.
Then again, she hasn’t read “Careful: A User’s Guide to Our Injury-Prone Minds,” a terrifying primer on the absurd and humiliating dangers of daily life by the psychologist and safety expert Steve Casner. Every year, Casner writes, people “trip while walking down the sidewalk too close to the curb,
fall into the street, and get hit by cars, trucks, and buses.” Reading “Careful” makes you want to stay in—a mistake, Casner writes, since fifty per cent of all fatal accidents happen in “that house of horrors we call home.” Puttering around the house is so dangerous that even people with hazardous jobs, such as electric-power-line installers, are more likely to do themselves in at home than at work.
Casner is no ordinary worrywart. He is a jet and helicopter pilot with degrees in computer science and “intelligent systems”; he works as a research psychologist at nasa, where he studies safety as part of the “human factors” division. He usually publishes in journals such as Aviation,
Space, and Environmental Medicine (one of his recent papers investigated the worthy question of airline pilots’ “knowledge and beliefs about over-the-counter medications”). In “Careful,” Casner treats quotidian life like a nasa space mission.
When his young daughter requests a bunk bed for her room, a “quick fact check” tells him that “about thirty-six thousand kids per year are taken to an emergency room following a bunk bed injury.” Casner calculates that, if six per cent of the U.S. population is around his daughter’s age, then
“one out of every five hundred kids in the country gets wheeled into the E.R. each year solely because of bunk beds.” He continues, “How many kids even have bunk beds? What if it’s one in five? That would mean one percent of all kids with bunk beds are heading to the E.R.” Bunk-bed request: denied
