10 Charts That Capture How the World Is Changing
10 Charts That Capture How the World Is Changing
From Ketamine to WhatsApp Users, Egg Freezing to AI Job Loss
Weekly writing about how technology and people intersect. By day, I’m building Daybreak to partner with early-stage founders. By night, I’m writing Digital Native about market trends and startup opportunities.
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10 Charts That Capture How the World Is Changing
We’ve done five editions of “10 Charts That Capture How the World Is Changing”—
We’re a bit overdue for a new edition, so here we go. Number six.
I’ve always been a visual learner, and charts help me process information. Charts are also an efficient way to show how the world’s changing. This set of charts covers a broad range of topics, from ketamine to WhatsApp users, egg freezing to AI job loss.
The Rise of Ketamine
The Peaks and Valleys of the Music Industry
Americans (Finally) Love WhatsApp
The Rise of Egg Freezing
The End of Work? We’ve Heard That Before.
Tough Times for VC Fundraising
Who Do Young Americans Live With?
The Decline of Churches
ATT and Mobile Game Spending
AI’s Impact on Freelancing
We’ll do this “10 Charts” series in two parts: #1-5 this week, and #6-10 next week. My hope is that this is an engaging way to visualize a variety of important trends.
Let’s dive in 📈
1️⃣ The Rise of Ketamine
Ketamine is on the rise. From a recent piece in Vice:
“According to wastewater analysis, the popularity of the drug rose in 12 of 15 cities in Eastern and Western Europe from 2022 to 2023. This tallies with the findings of the 2024 World Drugs Report, which reported global seizures of ketamine hitting a record high; East and South-East Asia saw an increase of 70 percent in just one year (more seizures are a reliable indicator of greater production and use).”
Of course, ketamine use isn’t all illegal. Increasingly, ketamine is being administered as a form of therapy to treat depression, anxiety, PTSD, and so on.
The market here is still nascent. I couldn’t find the underlying data behind this chart from Nova Advisor, and the market size here strikes me as a tad optimistic. Take it with a grain of salt. But the trend-line is certainly right: ketamine-assisted psychotherapy is growing rapidly.
What interests me is how ketamine’s rise intersects with the decline in mental health. The latter has been a frequent topic in the “10 Charts” series. From the very first edition:
From the March 2023 edition, a view focused specifically on teen girls:
And from last summer’s edition, a window into the solution: 23% of U.S. adults visited a mental health professional in 2022, up from 13% in 2004. (One fun stat: 91% of users of the dating app Hinge say they’d prefer to date someone in therapy.)
Clearly, mental health is one of the crises of our time. Thankfully, we also see a cultural revolution taking place and technology broadening access to care. Startups are part of the solution: last month’s Combatting the Teen Mental Health Crisis focused on Marble Health, a Daybreak company connecting teens to mental health professionals.
Ketamine might also be part of the answer. More research is touting the benefits of ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP)—here’s one such study—and we see startups like Journey and Mindbloom emerging to facilitate this type of care.
2️⃣ The Peaks and Valleys of Music
It’s hard to believe now, but CD sales made up over 50% of recorded music revenue for 19 years. CDs were so central to life, for so long, that I used to excitedly check the Money & Finance section of the paper every day to see how they were performing—only to learn years later that “CD rates” referred to Certificates of Deposit, not compact discs. Oops.
In the early 2010s, CDs were declining precipitously. This was a tough time for the music industry, until the white knight of streaming came along to take the place of CDs: streaming now accounts for 90%+ of recorded music revenue.
Of course, Spotify (market cap: $66B) dominates music streaming. And things are looking good for Spotify: the company’s stock popped 14% last week after strong earnings—hitting a three-year high—and the company is on track for its first-ever profitable year.
But when we look at the chart above, what interests me most is: what comes next?
The joint forces of mobile and cloud powered the rise of streaming and Spotify. What company (or companies) will emerge with the next big shift, generative AI? A few weeks ago in Keeping Up with the Gen Zs, we looked at how easy it is to produce slick AI songs using products like Suno. A simple prompt, like this one below, can generate a beautiful song.
Is this the future—everyone creating AI music?
I’m not so sure. I do think that AI will unlock some music creation, continuing the trends that streaming started: streaming fragmented music and abstracted away artist identity. We often listen to a song now because an algorithm surfaced it, not because we’re loyal to an artist. At the same time, though, streaming breathed new life into music and improved discoverability for the long tail of artists. AI may continue this shift.
But I have hard time believing the value (read: $$$) in music will shift from music consumption to music creation. The former is where Spotify shines—and I think Spotify can, and will, get away with charging consumers a higher price. I’d pay way more than $15 for access to every song on the planet. I expect with AI, the rich get richer; Spotify will remain strong, as it has a stranglehold on distribution. The jury’s out on how big of an opportunity music creation remains; most creative tools for musicians have traditionally remained niche.
3️⃣ Americans (Finally) Love WhatsApp
Okay, so this is less of a chart than a visual. But it comes courtesy of WhatsApp, which announced an important milestone last week: 100M monthly active users in the United States.
This is actually the first time that WhatsApp has announced U.S. user numbers. And that’s not an accident: it’s because U.S. user numbers have never been particularly good. The thing is, WhatsApp is hugely popular globally. Here is a chart, showing that popularity:
![Number of WhatsApp Users (2020–2024) [Updated Jun 2024]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff27d9008-315e-4b6f-aa64-85f1dc8a2f3e_1760x900.png "Number of WhatsApp Users (2020–2024) [Updated Jun 2024]")
We often forget, but WhatsApp still holds the crown for largest-ever venture-backed acquisition (Meta bought it for $19B in 2014; Adobe’s Figma acquisition would have taken the crown here, but was blocked by regulators). The app crossed 2B MAUs during the pandemic and never looked back. It’s a behemoth of a business—outside of America, life essentially runs on WhatsApp.
Yet Americans have never really embraced the app. Our iPhone-loving country is iMessage-obsessed. But that’s changing, with WhatsApp reporting that over 50% of those 100M MAUs are iPhone users. Both Google and Meta have targeted Apple by emphasizing the blue text-green text divide. WhatsApp is also leaning heavily into privacy in its ads, and recently brought on the Modern Family cast for a new marketing blitz.
Why does this matter?
First, the growth of messaging underscores the ongoing cleaving of social media. The messy middle—keeping up with the Joneses (acquaintances and loose social ties)—is fading, replaced by intimate messaging (e.g., WhatsApp, Telegram) and parasocial, broadcast-like, algorithmic feeds (e.g., TikTok, Reels).
Second, we should see a new generation of startups building on WhatsApp. In a good piece on the topic, my friend Sasha gives a few examples: Winedrops sends you daily discounted wine deals via WhatsApp with one-word ordering; Jem is an HR and employee benefits business built on WhatsApp (users can get their payslips or request a pay advance, all on WhatsApp); and Visito automates guest messages for hospitality businesses, also all on WhatsApp (example below).
Sure, there’s platform risk here—but WhatsApp is central enough to our lives that that risk is small, while the opportunity large.
4️⃣ The Rise of Egg Freezing
A frequent chart in Digital Native is a chart showing our aging population. This is arguably the biggest demographic shift happening in America:
We’re on track for more than 1 in 5 Americans to be a senior citizen by 2040.
Half the country is already over 50, and every day, 10,000 more Americans turn 65.
There are already more Baby Boomers in the U.S. than there are people in the U.K., Israel, and Switzerland combined.
But another group is getting older too: moms. The average age of a first-time mother has steadily crept up over the past few decades.
This trend—coinciding with improving technology and better healthcare access—is powering the rise of egg freezing. Egg freezing is still an arduous and opaque process; stigmas linger, and education around the topic is dismal. (My friend Cleo Abram recently published a YouTube video about her experience with egg freezing—it’s worth a watch.)
But egg freezing is certainly on the rise:
We’re seeing 30% year-over-year growth in cycles. Yet the magnitude is still small; here’s a look at how egg freezing compares to other reproductive health procedures:
Given demographic and cultural shifts, egg freezing should be at the beginning of decades-long growth. The question is: how much demand is there, when better technology, education, and policy unlock access? We’ll find out in the coming years.
5️⃣ The End of Work? We’ve Heard That Before.
Last week, Marc Andreessen made a bold prediction: by 2034, he declared, the traditional 9-to-5 job will become obsolete. Instead, he argued, we’ll live in a world where work as we know it is no longer necessary for survival or comfort. The reason? AI.
Yeah, I don’t think so.
We’ve heard this one before: in 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that because of innovation, we’d all be working 15 hours per week in 2030. We still have six years to go, but that prediction isn’t looking too great.
What Keynes missed is that technology change creates more of a shift in how humans work than in the overall amount of time worked. This is because work is not a rational economic trend; rather, it’s a cultural trend. Derek Thompson describes the story of work’s place in American culture in six words: “From jobs to careers to callings.” It’s easy to give up a job; it’s harder to give up a calling.
If technology does its job, everyone will ultimately earn higher wages and do more rewarding work. But we’ll still be working a lot.
Here are annual working hours by country:
Here’s a view of how this has trended over time. A downward trend, sure, but only a 10% decrease in 60 years.
That chart is through 2013. Here’s a more updated view, shown in hours per week rather than in hours per year. Over 40 years we’ve lost… 1.5 hours a week. I don’t think in another 10 years we’re going to drop 34 hours, as Andreessen predicts.
What will change: productivity.
Last week’s AI Is a Services Revolution argued that all knowledge work will be supercharged by AI. We can point to a long history of technology boosting worker productivity. Just as power looms transformed productivity in the 1800s, a bricklaying robot today can lay more than 3,000 bricks in an eight-hour shift, 10x what a human can do. JP Morgan now uses AI to review commercial loan agreements; what used to take 360,000 hours of lawyers’ time can be done in seconds.
Here’s FRED data on real GDP per capita over time—unsurprisingly, up and to the right:
If AI has a truly dramatic impact on American work, we maybe lose three or four hours a week over the next decade. Not 30. But with improvements in AI-driven productivity, we increase output per hour and GDP.
See you next week for #6 through #10. Until then 👋
Related Digital Native Pieces: Past Installments of 10 Charts
10 Charts That Capture How the World Is Changing (March 2024)
10 Charts That Capture How the World Is Changing (October 2023)
10 Charts That Capture How the World Is Changing (July 2023)
10 Charts That Capture How the World Is Changing (March 2023)
10 Charts That Capture How the World Is Changing (November 2022)
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