The Airchair Tourist
Friday, July 21st, 2023 Insurance IndustryPerhaps you took your vacation to ski Alta in February? Or were the first at Myrtle Beach in May? If you are reading this now, most likely you are one of us, landlocked at our desks, dreaming of vacations lost or yet to come.
As you consider your inboxes, the paperwork, the calls to return, the tasks before you, it is possible that you are wishing for an amazing thought, a little-known fact of distracting interest, a virtual shiny object to entertain your brain? Are you with me? Do you too wish for a ten-minute respite, the net equivalent of a spa treatment, the exhilaration of the Bagger Vance putt, the satisfaction of a ‘Well done’ from those who matter most to you?
Well, I’m not sure I have any of those available. However, I do have short, amazing, surprising tidbits -- facts, statistics, news updates -- to share. After all, it appears that at least 40 percent or more of us, even when on vacation, are tied to our electronic devices even if floating upon the Nile. Grab your cocktail parasol and join me in this junket from the sublime to the ridiculous, and see what you can see.
If you have gone nowhere and are considering your options, U.S. News & World Reports recommends top five vacation spots this year: Paris, Bora Bora, Glacier National Park, Rome, and the Swiss Alps. Travel + Leisure Magazine recommends you travel to Alexandria, Virginia, Cairo and the Nile, City, Nevada (‘City’ is a land art sculpture in rural Lincoln County, Nevada), Havana, Cuba and Tangier, Morocco. Yet, if you are reading this, then it is possible that you have elected not to take the fabulous vacation, and not to uproot for a week or ten days only to face re-entry.
Let’s work from that premise for a moment.
Let’s start with the who-would-want-to-be-someplace-fabulous-anyhow approach. Here are some of the top reasons not to travel. CDC statistics for 2017 and 2018 reflect that more than 1,500 US citizens died from non-natural causes in foreign countries, exclusive of war casualties. The leading cause was motor vehicle crashes, with 431 Americans dying in accidents in foreign countries. Next, 291 were victims of homicide, and 266 drowned or died as a result of boating incidents. Notably, 218 were determined to have died of suicide.
With that in mind, then, it is good to note that staying home offers many advantages
(medium.com). You can see everything you need or want to see on television or Instagram, and air travel is expensive and uncomfortable. You have a real job, with real responsibilities (you are needed here) -- and all your friends are here, at home, working. Foreign food is dicey at best, and the whole process is just too expensive. Travel breeds discontent. Reentry is brutal, and the same piled inbox awaits your return.
Via Travelers recommends travel for virtually the same reasons: to force you out of your comfort zone, to introduce you to new cultural experiences, and to force you to meet new people.
At the end of the day, with all the pros/cons of travel, I can provide you with only one snippet of a summer vacation -- interesting stories to tell. You can refresh your repertoire of anecdotes to include some interesting statistics.
One reason to be glad you are at your desk, according to data from the federal government’s ASPE, is that activities away from your desk can be dangerous. For instance, the riskiest sport? Basketball-- that pickup game at the rec center or on the courts across from your dentist’s office -- is perhaps not as innocuous as it seems. ‘According to NEISS, in 2012, among adults between the ages of 25 and 40 years, the most common injuries in basketball and soccer were fractured or sprained ankles and knees, followed by facial injuries and broken or dislocated fingers.’ If you skip the b-ball, dangers still lurk. The second highest risk is Bicycling, with 126.5 injuries per 100,000 attempts, including head and face injuries. The segment of the population experiencing the vast majority of injuries is men aged 25 to 40. In that patient population, Johns Hopkins University identifies a variety of sports injuries, most prevalently Achilles tendon ruptures, shin splints, ACL injuries, tennis elbow, shoulder injuries and tendonitis.
The largest growth area in both participation and injuries is pickleball. Yahoo Finance reported in March 2023 that ‘the average age of avid pickleball players is 34.8,’ with Los Angeles having the largest population segment (9.6 percent) having played pickleball in the past twelve months. Commensurately, as of June 27, 2023, Forbes, CNN and CBS were all quoting analysts at UBS that pickleball could lead to up to $500 million in medical costs in 2023, largely related to lower extremity injuries, largely among seniors. Forbes cites Sports and Fitness Industry Association
data that reflect a 113.1 percent rise in pickleball participation from 2020 to 2022, with the following result: ‘67,000 emergency department trips, 366,000 outpatient visits, 88,000 outpatient surgeries, 4,700 hospitalizations and 20,000 post-acute episodes.’
Not the active type? Well, the most popular hobby in the United States is cooking and baking at 39 percent (newhobbybox.com) It bears further note here that the most popular dessert in America is chocolate chip cookies, followed in rapid succession by cupcakes, brownies, and fudge, with apple pie rounding out the top five. (inthekitchenwithmatt.com)
Notably, travel is not among the top ten hobbies, which include reading (36 percent), pets (34 percent), video games (32 percent), television (31 percent), sports (28 percent) fitness (25 percent), fine arts (24 percent), crafting (23 percent), music (22 percent). Not surprisingly, PetHelpful! reports that dogs are the most popular or at least most common pets in this country, living in 48 million households, while cats are close behind at 31 million homes. As for fine arts, consider the
most famous painting and, for books, the best-selling author. I’ll reveal those anon.
So now you have spent your ten-minute getaway with me, learning a few trinkets of information to share when your neighbor recounts a trip to City, Nevada. You can explain that you have a very important job, that insurance more than matters, big picture and small picture. In 2022, $7 trillion dollars was written in premiums (gross with $1.4 trillion net). Across the board, insurance industry profits are only 3-5 percent. The insurance industry constitutes over three percent of the GDP, also
employing 2.86 million individuals. Property and casualty claims constitute 48 percent of premiums and since the pandemic, the take-up rate for cyber insurance has grown by 78 percent. (zippia.com) And, among the recording artists who have songs about insurance? The Beatles, Taylor Swift, The Ramones, Ella Fitzgerald, Kanye West. (Insurdinary.ca)
So, at the end of the day, your desk is not such a bad place to be: safe except for trip hazards(einteinmed.edu), comforting, and largely non-threatening (or at least ‘threatening’ in the usual, rather reassuring ways). What you do does matter for all of us, and that is true whether you elect to try the Nile or visit the kitchen for cookies.
Oh yes, and the best-selling author is Agatha Christie (wordsrated.com), with the best-selling writer for 2023 being Emily Henry, author of Happy Place. (forbes.com) One last thought? The most famous painting is the Mona Lisa. (timeout.com)
The summer is your oyster. (dmagazine.com) Hopefully, this short travel around the world and back, without ever leaving your armchair, has brought you to a happier place.
