Restaurant spending per capita

It is a curious fact, and one that ought to trouble us more than it apparently does, that Americans began spending more money on restaurant meals at almost exactly the moment more of them decided they needed professional help removing demons from their relatives. Whether the demons were ordering appetizers or simply making their hosts too anxious to cook at home remains unclear. The correlation between these two things is so tight it makes you wonder if we're all just looking at the same terrified face from different angles.

The real story here is probably much duller but no less interesting: both trends ride the same wave of American economic anxiety and cultural fragmentation. Restaurant spending climbs when people are either celebrating modest wage gains or, more likely, outsourcing meals because they're working longer hours and feeling more spiritually unmoored. Exorcist training, meanwhile, follows upticks in reported demonic possession claims—which themselves correlate with cultural stress, the rise of paranormal media, and the simple fact that more Catholics were aware such services existed. Between 2010 and 2015, per capita restaurant spending went from roughly 620 dollars to 750 dollars, an increase of about 20 percent. In that same window, the Diocese of Arlington alone tripled its exorcist roster. Neither statistic tells you much on its own, but together they sketch a portrait of a nation spending its way out of both hunger and despair.

What we're looking at is not causation but synchronicity—the phenomenon that makes humans feel so clever when they spot patterns that mean absolutely nothing. Both restaurant spending and exorcist training respond to deeper currents: economic booms, population density, media saturation, the peculiar way Americans process existential dread through consumption. The data doesn't judge us for looking for connections between tacos and theology. It simply reflects us back at ourselves, looking increasingly confused. We are, it seems, quite predictable.