Total student loan debt outstanding

It is a curious feature of the universe that the more young Americans owe money to the federal government, the more they subscribe to a man who gives away money on the internet. One might imagine these two forces operating in separate dimensions entirely, like gravity and human decency, yet here they are, moving together with the kind of synchronisation usually reserved for migrating birds or the plot devices in a Christopher Nolan film. The correlation sits at 0.952, which is to say, nearly perfect, which is to say, almost certainly meaningless.

But here is the thing that caught us off guard: both trends track almost perfectly with the internet adoption curve and the emergence of what we might politely call the "creator economy" between 2016 and 2022. Student loan debt had been climbing steadily since the 2008 financial crisis, while MrBeast—whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson—launched his channel in 2012 but didn't achieve escape velocity until roughly 2017, at which point both metrics began their synchronized climb like synchronized swimmers who happened to be wearing very different uniforms. The average student loan debt per borrower in that period grew from around 28,950 dollars to over 37,000 dollars, while MrBeast went from roughly 8 million subscribers to 150 million—a growth so vertical it makes you slightly dizzy when you actually plot it out.

What we are witnessing is almost certainly not a causal relationship but rather two separate expressions of the same cultural moment: a generation navigating precarious finances while simultaneously building a parasocial relationship with entertaining millionaires. This is what pattern-seeking creatures do when handed seven data points and access to spreadsheets, which is to say, we find stories in noise, and we are rarely wrong about being confused. The debt and the subscribers climbed together, proving nothing except that correlation remains a remarkably convincing liar.