Alcohol-impaired driving fatalities

It turns out that as we have collectively decided to pay people with large followings to tell us which snacks to eat, we have also decided—quite separately, one assumes—to drive while drunk with increasing enthusiasm. The universe does not typically reward both activities simultaneously, which suggests either a profound coincidence or that we have all become rather worse at understanding what we actually want from our evenings. One of these things kills people. The other just makes them buy energy drinks they do not need.

What is almost certainly happening is that both metrics are simply passengers on the same economic wave. The years 2016-2022 saw explosive growth in smartphone penetration, social media platforms maturing into advertising behemoths, and—less cheerfully—a steady rise in vehicle miles traveled as economies reopened after COVID disruptions. Add in the fact that impaired driving fatalities tend to spike during periods of economic confidence and normalcy (people drive more, take more risks), and you have two entirely separate phenomena that just happen to be correlating with the same underlying current: a growing, increasingly connected, increasingly fractured world spending money on things both frivolous and fatal. The influencer marketing industry grew from roughly 1.7 billion dollars in 2016 to over 16 billion by 2022, which is to say we went from treating it as a novelty to treating it as infrastructure, all while road fatalities climbed from about 37,000 to 42,000 annually.

The real lesson here is not that Instagram is killing people, tempting as that narrative might be. It is simply that when you have seven data points and enough desperation to find meaning, the universe will happily oblige by serving up a correlation coefficient that looks almost supernatural. We are pattern-seeking creatures living in an interconnected economy, and sometimes two entirely unrelated disasters just happen to dance in step.