A couple of years ago, on the r/Showerthoughts subreddit, user u/JollyTraveler posted the following thought: “People will swim in the ocean, even though there are definitely many corpses in it. People will not swim in a pool with a corpse in it. Humans all have a corpse:water ratio that is acceptable for them to swim in.”
I say this with no exaggeration: This post has been bouncing around in my brain ever since. For the last two years, every time I swim in the ocean, a lake, or even a clearly corpse-less swimming pool, I think about how close a corpse would have to be for me to get out of the water.
The reason I keep thinking about it is: I don’t know the answer! On Tumblr, the post went viral, and one user tried to boil it down to being able to see the corpse.
So then, my thinking is: Maybe it’s just about ~knowing~ that there’s a corpse in the water or not. But that doesn’t work, because as the Reddit OP stated, there is basically a 100% chance of a corpse — human or animal — being in the ocean, much less a lake or river. And I swim in those with no corpse-related concerns.
Other Tumblr users tried to get to the bottom of it, and came up with theories about whether or not the water is moving. But a lake isn’t really a moving body of water, so is it more about the size?
Or is it the depth? And if it IS the depth, does the corpse have to be at the bottom?
And if the corpse has to be at the bottom, isn’t that then just a function of distance? Would it be the same if a corpse was 50 feet below you in a deep pool vs. 50 feet away from you in a shallow pool?
The closest I’ve gotten to an answer is something like this redditor’s comment, which indicates that it’s more about the total volume of the body of water vs. the number of corpses. But even still, proximity is a factor because if I’m in the ocean and there’s only one single corpse in it and that corpse is right next to me…buddy, you’d best believe I’m getting out of the water.
But maybe what it all comes down to is your ~awareness~ of a corpse? Like, on some level you know there’s a corpse somewhere in the ocean, but you don’t ~know~ it’s there, so it’s fine. Also, does the size/type of the actual corpse matter? Because there are dead bugs in swimming pools all the time, and that’s fine(ish), but if there’s anything larger than that, forget it.
Anyway, this haunts me. It keeps me up at night. Please let me know in the comments what you think the answer/ratio is.
Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/andyneuenschwander/swimming-pool-showerthought-corpses