Do you fear death?

If not — well first, tell me your secrets, but second, have we got the Facebook group for you.

To give a brief introduction, stairs. We use them every day. Sometimes we go up, sometimes we go down. You’re likely already familiar.

What you might not know is that for every set of stairs, there is someone who builds them. And for every 1,000 stair builders, there is a stair builder with the devil in their heart — a contractor sent by Satan himself to turn every set of stairs they create into an Escherian nightmare.

Enter “stairs designed by people who are not afraid to die,” a Facebook group created in 2020 in which users share the hellish creations that deranged builders have unleashed onto the world.

Sometimes, the builder is admittedly not at fault — instead, it’s the interior designer who’s to blame. For example, some designers insist the 1980s never ended. These madmen choose to cover their stairs in varying patterns that make it unclear where one ends and the next begins. We call these designers “jerks.”

But often, it is indeed the builders who are responsible for these (literal) trip-inducing stairways. Case in point: This staircase found in Egypt, which apparently celebrates the legacy of the pharaohs by encouraging you to join them in the afterlife.

Admittedly, though, some of these staircases do look cool. One example recently shared to the subreddit r/RedneckEngineering shows a staircase made entirely out of wood pallets. If it lasts and it works, I’m not complaining — and it even has a handrail!

However, the message that almost all of these stairways sends is that we really don’t need to reinvent the staircase. Wikipedia tells me that stairs have been around since at least 470 BCE, and if they haven’t changed that much in the intervening millennia, doesn’t that mean that they were doing just fine without innovation? We don’t need to “reimagine the staircase for the 21st century,” we need to go up a floor. Or down, I guess.

But as long as people keep building these crazy things, we’ll keep laughing at them — very carefully, as we grip onto the handrail for dear life.