Add this to an ongoing list of disasters plaguing millennials’ existence: electric scooters.
According to a new report published by the Journal of the American Medical Association Surgery, the number of electric scooter injuries among American millennials (18-34 years old) increased by 354 percent in one year, from 2017 to 2018. In 2014, when the research began, 582 injuries among millennials were reported to the US National Electronic Injury Surveillance System. In 2018, that number skyrocketed to 5,309. As the Guardian points out, the majority of the injuries took place in cities. If you live in a metropolis and have felt irrationally annoyed by the increased number of electric scooter brands littering your beautiful city streets, well, turns out there’s an even bigger and better reason to hate them: they’re dangerous!
As an American millennial who once, completely devoid of irony, scooted around Brooklyn with her childhood Razor scooter (I was still a teenager and it felt like the safest/most direct way to get from warehouse gig to warehouse gig, OKAY?), I am pretty sure that an electric scooter injury is in my future. In a time of total unknowable dystopia, I choose to take comfort in knowing that I, too, will one day faceplant after taking a Lyft scooter too fast down a curved sidewalk in Los Angeles. If the statistics keep climbing in the way that they do, perhaps some of my loved ones will, too. And I think that’s beautiful.