US candy and chocolate sales

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a YouTube content creator in possession of a large subscriber count must be in want of a correlation with breakfast cereal sales, which explains why MrBeast's meteoric rise from 2016 to 2022 tracked almost perfectly with Americans buying more chocolate and candy, as if the universe had decided these two things were somehow the same thing, which they are not, and yet.

Here is the thing about this correlation: it probably isn't MrBeast hypnotising people into chocolate consumption, though I would not have ruled it out entirely. Both trends ride the same wave of general economic expansion and internet penetration during those years—more people online, more disposable income, more reasons to buy treats while watching videos. But there is something genuinely physical happening here: YouTube's algorithm improvements made video discovery easier around 2017-2018, which coincided with post-recession consumer confidence fully returning, and candy sales benefited from that same rising tide. It is like watching two different swimmers get faster because the pool was drained and refilled with faster water.

We are pattern-recognition machines who have accidentally built machines to show us more patterns, and sometimes those patterns are just both riding the same economic current with no knowledge of each other. This is oddly comforting: MrBeast did not secretly cause your chocolate consumption, and you did not cause his success. You were simply both participating in the same inexplicable 2016-2022 expansion. The universe remains indifferent.