Active geocaches worldwide

Between 2005 and 2022, the worldwide count of active geocaches grew from a few hundred thousand to over three million, as participants presumably walked, hiked, and scrambled through parks and forests seeking hidden containers. Over the same 18 years, adult obesity prevalence also increased. The correlation of 0.97 is perhaps the most dispiriting finding on this list. Geocaching is not making anyone thinner. Or rather, it is not making enough people thin enough to register against a global trend. The containers remain hidden. The waistlines remain.

Global adult obesity prevalence has risen steadily from roughly 13% in 2005 to over 16% by 2022, driven by urbanization, processed food availability, sedentary work, and the spread of Western dietary patterns to emerging economies. Active geocaches worldwide grew from around 300,000 in 2005 to over 3 million by 2022 as the hobby expanded internationally through smartphone GPS adoption. Both trends ran continuously upward over the same period; the geocaching community is real and active, but it represents a small fraction of the global population and has no measurable effect on the obesity trend it accidentally tracks.

This correlation is a small, specific reminder that the existence of a healthy behavior and the prevalence of an unhealthy outcome are not in competition with each other. They can both grow, and often do, because they operate at entirely different scales.