Last year 32.2% of the people struck by a New York City subway car were killed. Don’t become a statistic.
You can do anything you want. Just don’t die on the subway tracks because it would all but guarantee your becoming a point of data that is part of a set of data. You don’t want that.
While we’re at it, don’t be among the 25% of deaths that occur annually from heart disease, or the 1.6% of deaths that occur via suicide, or the 36% of deaths from food-borne illnesses caused by known pathogens. If you want to not be a statistic, you can’t die of anything. You can’t survive anything either. 80% of adults who get Typhoid fever recover completely. If you contract Typhoid and are thinking about surviving or dying please know that someone, somewhere, is gripping a pen with the tip resting mercilessly on a pad. Don’t be that tally mark. You’re better off dead.
That said, let go of your inhibitions. Apart from any action that results in numerical representation for reference or analysis, your life is a blank canvas. You can dance, fly, sing, love, laugh, forgive, or forget, so long as you aren’t counted, measured, labeled, recorded, logged, or noted.
You may be thinking, “Well, I’m already a member of the 63.5% of New Yorkers who live in an owner-occupied housing unit, so what further harm could an oncoming A-train inflict?” To answer your question, all the harm. Being a statistic currently is permissible, or, at the very least, not against the rules. Personally, I’m part of the 12.8% of Indians in the United States who were born here, and I wholly make up the 50% of the occupants of my apartment who respect the goddamn agreed-upon protocol of washing dishes within 24 hours. I also represent the 0.000000000143% of the global population that has yet to achieve his True potential. All OK. What I’m specifically castigating is the heinous metamorphosis into a permanent single measure of an attribute of a sample.
Stopping one’s own birth might seem like a surefire strategy for avoiding this minefield (prior to conception, of course, because abortion statistics are still statistics). Even then, your would-be parents’ inaction might bleed into some early ’80s sobriety data. So don’t.
Becoming a statistical outlier is similarly tempting, if you’re a moron. Sure, you could visit your local gym 256 times a week and get all cocky about being a discarded data point, but what did you really accomplish, apart from becoming an exhausted turd who’s still in the crosshairs of an unrelenting, mathematical onslaught?
Perhaps the best hope of all would be a cataclysmic or nuclear global event that renders Planet Earth a dossier-less, post-apocalyptic utopia. Even still, you might have unwittingly joined the 3% of the still-orbiting debris that is carbon (or something), which is the exact opposite of what I meant when I said, “Don’t become a statistic.” However, without any human-made mechanisms for summarizing, collecting, presenting and interpreting data, this may be as close to a win as possible. Rest in somewhat peace.