Every Day

10/20/12

Every Day

I got to thinking - and probably shouldn't - about the things that occur every day every where to somebody.  I decided to leave out the obvious stuff like buying groceries, paying bills and running errands because they're boring.  So here's what I came up with while I was thinking:

Every day:

Somebody is being born (approximately 267 every minute) and somebody is dying (approximately 108 every minute)
Getting married (6100 a day) or divorced (10,000 a day)
Getting a driver's license (3,000,000) or giving one up
Starting or stopping a career 
Take a vacation (86% each year)
Having a birthday (approximately 18,375,323 today) or an anniversary (couldn't find any numbers)
Laughing or crying
Buy a house (average 900,000 in the US) or sell one (approximately 13,780 every day)
Buying a car (approximately 16 million new ones or 450,000 used) or selling one (16,153,952 sold in 2007)
Watching sunrises and sunsets (sadly no statistics for this)
Learning to swim or dive
Getting a speeding ticket (over 100,000 a day)
Having an accident (approximately 1 every second or 5.25 million each year)
Buying flowers (only statistic I could find is that in 2009 37 million people bought flowers on Valentine's Day) or jewelry (nice but no numbers)
Buying a lottery ticket (in the UK about 32 million every week)
Winning a lottery (about 1500 a year in the US or about 3-4 a day)
Reading a book (average 24 a year for an e-book versus 15 a year for non e-books) or writing a book (approximately 15,000 agent queries a year)

For some things we do there are just no statistics.  Why do we care so much about how many accidents we have and there are no numbers for something as delightful as sunrise/sunset watching?  Don't beat me up about the statistics.  The internet is full of numbers and I grabbed a few.  If you did the research you might come up with different answers.  Once I started looking at the statistics I found them interesting and wanted to share.

Have a great Saturday.

P
 
 Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable - Mark Twain