Per capita egg consumption in the US

It turns out that Americans' relationship with eggs and their relationship with automated voices trying to sell them timeshares have evolved in perfect, inexplicable synchrony over the past eight years, which is either a profound statement about the interconnectedness of modern life or a reminder that if you plot literally any two upward-trending lines against each other, they will eventually seem to be having a conversation. We have apparently been eating more eggs at precisely the rate that someone, somewhere, decided we should be hearing from robots. The universe is not laughing at us, but it is definitely taking notes.

The real culprit is probably something far more boring and therefore more genuinely interesting: both egg consumption and robocall volume scale almost perfectly with population growth and smartphone penetration in the same eight-year window. Consider that between 2015 and 2022, the US population grew by roughly 2 percent, but smartphone ownership and cellular connectivity grew far faster, and simultaneously, industrial agriculture ramped up production of cheap protein to meet rising demand—a phenomenon you can practically feel in the data, like watching a single trend split into two. What we're seeing is less a causal link than two separate tracks laid down by the same expanding infrastructure, both benefiting from the same economic momentum. The coincidence is comfortable, almost companionable.

We are creatures who find patterns in everything, which is either our greatest strength or our most elaborate survival mechanism, depending on how you feel about robocalls. The egg-and-spam correlation tells us nothing about eggs or spam, but it tells us everything about the way two unrelated systems can grow in lockstep while remaining wholly indifferent to one another. Correlation is not causation, but it is excellent company.