USPS mail carrier dog bite incidents

Here we have the universe's way of telling us that as Americans grew increasingly desperate to find love online, postal workers grew correspondingly less likely to be bitten by dogs, which suggests either that romance algorithms have somehow pacified the nation's canine population or that we have simply discovered the most elaborate cosmic joke about substitution effects ever recorded. The correlation is so tight it could strangle a reasonable person.

What's probably happening here is something mundane enough to break your heart: the 2016-2022 window caught online dating revenue exploding from roughly $1.2 billion to $3.2 billion as the industry consolidated, urbanised, and went algorithmic, while simultaneously the postal service was contracting routes, reducing delivery frequency in rural areas where dogs tend to be both more numerous and more protective of their territory. As cities grew denser and more singles matched with each other in apartments rather than farmhouses, mail carriers simply encountered fewer territorial farm dogs—think of it as 800 million fewer dog encounters across seven years as delivery patterns shifted toward urban apartment complexes with lobbies. The real story is that two systems were responding to the same underlying current: the acceleration of American life toward cities and away from places where you needed a dog to announce visitors.

We are pattern-matching creatures living in a universe of legitimate randomness, forever convinced that when two things move together they must be dancing to the same music. But sometimes mail carriers just stop getting bitten because the dogs have moved to suburbs, and sometimes people stop going to bars because they're swiping at 2 a.m. instead, and these two facts have nothing to do with each other whatsoever. The correlation is real. Everything else is wishful thinking.