US nutrition and energy bar retail sales

We have discovered that the more people subscribe to a man who gives away money on the internet, the more other people buy compressed oats in foil packets, and the universe has apparently decided this makes perfect sense. One wonders if the correlation works backwards—whether each nutrition bar sold creates a small increment of MrBeast subscriber potential, like we're all unconsciously funding his content through our mid-afternoon snacking decisions. The cosmic joke is that both things are essentially the same product: portable dopamine delivery systems.

What's likely happening is that we're watching two separate trends ride the same wave of economic expansion and smartphone penetration between 2016 and 2022. Energy bar sales grew because more people were working longer hours, commuting further, and developing the conviction that they needed snacks to be both convenient and vaguely virtuous—a belief that had nothing to do with MrBeast, who didn't even start his channel until 2012 and only became genuinely viral around 2017. Meanwhile, YouTube's subscriber counts were inflating across the platform like a soufflé in a microwave, with MrBeast simply catching more of that rising tide than most because he figured out the algorithm happened to reward elaborate spectacle. If you stretched the period to include 2023, you'd probably watch both lines flatten or wobble in different directions entirely.

The real lesson here is that our brains are pattern-recognition machines that have become so efficient at spotting connections they've started seeing them even when one variable is essentially a celebrity and the other is a breakfast item. We should probably be less surprised by correlations like these and more curious about why we keep expecting the world to make narrative sense when it's mostly just things happening at the same time. Sometimes a snack bar is just a snack bar.