A U.S. citizen who travels the world is more likely to die in an accident — a car crash, say — or suffer food poisoning or contract an illness abroad. The irony is that the actual research points somewhere different than intuition suggests: a Global Commission on Aging study found that men who don’t travel at least once a year face a 20% higher risk of death, and a 30% higher risk of dying from heart disease, than those who travel regularly. The landmark Helsinki Businessman Study, tracking more than 1,200 participants over 50 years, found that those taking fewer than three weeks of vacation per year had a 37% higher chance of dying before age 75.
Understanding this matters — not because travel is risk-free, but because someone who already accepts the real risks of travel (accidents, bad food, illness) for the sake of living well is being inconsistent if they simultaneously reject a strictly safer alternative for a mundane task. If you can pay your landlord digitally instead of driving across town and risking your life to do it, then you should pay digitally. The risk you already accept while traveling isn’t an excuse to ignore the risk you can actually eliminate at home — it’s proof you already know how to tell a risk worth taking from one that isn’t.
