Darwin Award: British Influencer Seeking Great Social Media Pic Falls 630 Feet With Predictable Results

There's a reason that the Darwin Awards exist. To qualify, one has to play a stupid game that awards stupid prizes and, in so doing, remove one's self permanently from the gene pool, and in so doing, improve the human race. Note that the stupid prize doesn't have to involve a fatal mistake; one can remove one's self permanently from the gene pool by losing the capacity to reproduce by a more... local injury. At any rate, those are the rules, and on Monday, we read that a 26-year-old British "influencer" seeking a noteworthy social media stunt played a stupid game and won a stupid prize.

A daredevil British influencer has died after falling from Spain's highest bridge.
The 26-year digital creator is said to have plunged from the 630ft Castilla-La Mancha bridge in Talavera de la Reina a 90-minute drive south-west of Madrid early this morning over the Tagus River as he climbed it to film a social media stunt.
Local councillor Macarena Munoz confirmed the tragedy today as she said accessing the bridge was 'totally banned'.
She added: 'We have made it clear on several occasions that it's not something that can be done in any circumstances.'
The unnamed British man is said to have been with a compatriot aged 24 when he plunged to his death.

Paging Dr. Darwin, Dr. Charles Darwin. Dr. Charles Darwin, please pick up the white courtesy phone.

Look, young people, especially young men, have a long history of trying dumb stunts. My own Allamakee County youth involved many misadventures that can be summed up with the words "Hold my beer and watch this!" In one particularly dumb stunt, a Saturday evening had found me wanting to go to a dance in a local village about ten miles away; my car was out of gas, my parents had gone away for the weekend and taken the keys to my Dad's pickup with them - so I took Dad's 1959 Ford dump truck to the dance.

These dances were great; they were held in what had been an old one-room schoolhouse with a local band. Young people from all the surrounding farms and small towns would show up. As usual, there were a couple of kegs in the parking lot, and having been unsuccessful in attracting the attention of any of the young ladies in attendance, I found myself hanging out with some other guys at the keg. One of them asked who the dump truck belonged to. I raised my hand, and someone said, "Hey, if a bunch of us climbed in the back, and you dumped it out, how long do you suppose we could hang on?"

This is one of those things that can only be resolved by experimentation, so we did that, and fortunately, there were no broken bones, just bruises and scrapes. But there's a distinction to be drawn here; the chances of fatality in that mixture of young men and beer was nil. Not so for the guy on that Spanish bridge, who has now assumed ambient temperature.

At least he's not running for office.

WATCH: Walz Gets Booed at Michigan Game, Called 'Tampon Tim'—and What Was That He Did With His Finger?

As long as there are stupid young men, those stupid young men are going to play stupid games and win stupid prizes. It's too bad when one ends up as a fatality - but we are all responsible for the outcomes of all our decisions, good and bad, as this Brit "influencer" is for him. We can, at least, use him as an object lesson to warn other stupid young men that, yes, you too can end up as a splat.