US GDP per capita

Snapchat's user growth tracks US GDP per capita with the kind of precision that should make at least one economist nervous. Either ephemeral messaging is the engine of the modern economy, or the modern economy was always going to grow whether anyone was sending snaps or not. Probably the latter.

Both rose for entirely unrelated reasons through the late 2010s. US GDP per capita climbed steadily as the post-2008 recovery matured, while Snapchat's daily active users grew as Gen Z adoption deepened. Two compounding curves, both products of growing-up-in-the-2010s rather than any shared mechanism.

So the correlation is two upward lines cleared by the same decade. Neither caused the other. Both moved in the same room.