US coal production

It is a curious fact, and one that ought to trouble us more than it apparently does, that as one bearded man accumulated roughly 200 million followers by filming himself giving away money to strangers, another set of bearded men—or at least, men working in regions where beards are statistically more common—were quietly shutting down coal mines across America. The universe, it seems, cannot abide two forms of wealth accumulation simultaneously. One had to go.

What we're actually watching here is probably just the slow death of coal colliding with the rise of digital entertainment as the primary currency of human attention. Between 2016 and 2022, MrBeast went from nobody to somebody to somebody with a production budget the size of a small nation, while US coal production fell from 759 million short tons to 602 million short tons—a decline driven by cheaper natural gas, renewable energy mandates, and the simple fact that fewer power plants were burning the stuff. Both trends ride the same economic wave: a country gradually shifting what it values and how it generates energy, money, and meaning. The confounding variable, in other words, isn't mystical—it's just that technological disruption and economic restructuring don't bother to announce themselves to one industry at a time.

What we have stumbled upon is less a correlation and more a synchronicity, two unrelated dominoes falling because someone else knocked over the first one in 1989. It should comfort us slightly, or perhaps alarm us further, that the universe makes perfect sense once you know what you're looking for. Coal and YouTube subscribers had nothing to do with each other.