Self-Help Requires Tequila
Spirits Consumption vs US Self-Help Book Print Sales
As spirits consumption rose, self-help book sales rose with it. Nobody reads "Atomic Habits" sober. Every breakthrough chapter is a margarita away. The journey to your best self runs through happy hour.
“The optimal blood-alcohol content for finishing a self-help book is precisely 0.06%. Any higher and you start a podcast.”
— Dr. Brené Bourbon, Productivity Coach
Why this correlation is stupid
The numbers above are real. Public data on Spirits Consumption and US Self-Help Book Print Sales happens to move in lockstep closely enough to produce r ≈ 99% (positive) — a value high enough that, in a less skeptical world, someone would file a Substack post about it. Here, it earns a chart and a chuckle.
Statisticians call this a spurious correlation: two trends that share a shape without sharing a cause. With enough variables tracked over enough years, you can find pairings like this one between almost any two phenomena. Confounding factors, common drivers (population growth, smartphone adoption, the unstoppable march of time), or pure chance can all make graphs hold hands.
Source data is drawn from public datasets. We do not endorse any causal claim — only the comedic one.
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