US mobile phone subscriptions per 100 people

It turns out that Americans have spent the last two decades acquiring mobile phones and antidepressants at nearly identical rates, which suggests either that we figured out how to weaponize smartphones or that the universe has a very specific sense of irony. Both rose from somewhere around 50 per 100 people in 2002 to over 100 per 100 by 2022, which means we now have more phones than people and more prescriptions for melancholy than we have people to feel melancholy. One might almost suspect these things are related, which they almost certainly are not.

But here is where it gets interesting: both trends almost certainly reflect the same underlying machinery grinding away beneath American life—economic anxiety, social fragmentation, and the peculiar way that technological adoption follows economic cycles. As incomes rose and fell between 2002 and 2022, as the 2008 financial crisis happened and then unhappened, as social media went from novelty to life support system, both mobile subscriptions and antidepressant use drifted upward with the kind of patient inevitability usually reserved for tides. It's worth noting that antidepressant prescriptions increased by roughly 65 percent over the period, which is to say that if you lined up all the additional prescriptions end to end they would stretch from your despair to someone else's, and back again.

The real lesson here, if there is one, is that correlation this tight between two such disparate measurements probably tells us less about cause and effect and more about the fact that American life itself has been trending the same direction for twenty years. We are all climbing the same invisible escalator, picking up phones and pills as we go, not because one causes the other but because something larger—economic precarity, connectivity, the erosion of older social structures—is pushing both of us toward it simultaneously. The question worth asking is not why phones and antidepressants rose together. It's what they're both rising into.