Exercise equipment ER visits in the US

It is a truth universally acknowledged that as fewer Europeans stuffed themselves onto budget aircraft between 2010 and 2022, Americans mysteriously stopped throwing themselves at stationary bicycles hard enough to require emergency intervention. One might have expected these two phenomena to move in opposite directions, the way sensible things do, but instead they executed a perfect synchronized swim toward the exit, correlation coefficient trailing behind like a confused dolphin. The universe, it turns out, is not merely indifferent to our expectations but actively committed to confusing them.

The most likely culprit is probably economic cycles and their peculiar grip on human behavior. The post-2008 recession decimated discretionary spending, which means fewer people buying Pelotons and treadmills during the lean years, but also fewer people taking those budget flights to Palma de Mallorca. As disposable income crept back between 2015 and 2019, both activities rebounded together, moving like synchronized swimmers who'd never actually met but read the same financial news. Then came the pandemic, which somehow convinced Americans that gym equipment was a good investment (it wasn't, mostly) while simultaneously making continental travel feel radioactive, and Ryanair's load factors collapsed. You're looking at roughly 280 million Americans and 200 million annual Ryanair passengers moving in eerie tandem, which is to say that when people feel slightly less broke, they simultaneously buy things they'll feel bad about and book flights they'll regret.

What we're witnessing here is the rather humbling discovery that exercise equipment ER visits and budget airline passengers are both expressions of the same underlying human impulse: the conviction that we deserve to be different versions of ourselves next month. They rise together when we have money and optimism, and they fall together when we don't, which tells us almost nothing useful about either phenomenon individually but quite a lot about how we move through the world in herds. The data asks a simple question we cannot quite answer: are we chasing wellness or are we fleeing ourselves.