Citi Bike annual trips (NYC)

It is a curious fact, and one that many people find mildly troubling when they first learn it, that the number of people cycling around Manhattan on rented bicycles has almost precisely tracked the number of people subscribing to a man who films himself giving away money to strangers on the internet. One might have expected the universe to arrange itself with somewhat more dignity than this. It apparently did not.

What's genuinely astonishing here is that both metrics are proxies for the same underlying phenomenon: the explosive growth of urban millennial disposable income and leisure time between 2016 and 2022. Citi Bike expanded its network and user base alongside rising urban wages and a cultural shift toward visible eco-consciousness; MrBeast's subscriber growth rode the same wave of smartphone penetration, shorter attention spans, and the particular economics of attention that made his content profitable enough to fund those spectacular giveaways. Both are essentially measuring the same generous slice of the American population having more money and time than before—you could fit roughly 8 million annual Citi Bike trips in the watch time of MrBeast's 2022 subscriber base, which is a comparison that makes no sense whatsoever and yet somehow still feels true.

We are pattern-seeking creatures who have mistaken correlation for cosmic significance, which is to say we are having a perfectly normal Tuesday. The real story isn't that Citi Bikes and YouTube subscribers are mysteriously linked; it's that they're both symptoms of a peculiar moment in American urban life that we're still too busy living to properly understand. Perhaps in a decade we'll recognize what we were actually measuring all along.