I've picked up a new hobby: fact-checking Instagram stories that careless friends send my way. The AI slop, the missing citations, the made-up sources and the willful misunderstandings, it's all there day after day. Sometimes it's a lie by omission, like removing the date from a seven-years-old article to make readers believe something terrible is happening. Sometimes it's a straight-up lie, prompting ChatGPT for controversial headlines supporting one culture war or another. As far as hobbies go, this one won't run out of steam anytime soon.

We may therefore agree that any talk about statistics on the media is tainted from the get-go, a point I must raise for you to believe what is to come, namely: that there are two statistics so unbelievable (as in, I didn't believe them at first) that, once I had no choice but to begrudgingly accept them, changed the way in which I see the world and the human cost of doing what we're doing.

The one about why we are screwed

The first one is straightforward: it's the number of deaths in Germany since 2020 for every single day, with 2026 plotted in red:

If you're a normal, cognitively-healthy adult who knows how to read a graph then you may have noticed the spike. If you live in Europe you may have also recognized that the spike corresponds to the latest heatwave. But let me throw a couple more numbers at you: the median number of deaths in Germany since 2001 is 2417 people, the median number of deaths for June 29 is 2305, and the number of deaths for June 29 2026 is 4832 -- that is, more than two thousand extra deaths on this single day and outpacing any day during the pandemic. Once we add all of June into the mix we reach an excess of five thousand heat-related deaths, a development called "virtually impossible" without human-induced climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

I want to believe I'm not an idiot (evidence notwithstanding) and I won't pretend that I didn't know about global warming. But getting the confirmation that we no longer need to measure it exclusively in degrees Celsius or CO2 particles, but now also in bodies (if you want Freedom Units, the proper conversion is 1.7 September 11s) has been a sobering realization.

The one about why the new generation is also screwed

The second graph is harder to track down - I don't know when I saw its first version and, since its results have been replicated, it's hard for me to know which one is the original.

This may have been the first one I saw. It depicts the number of hospitalizations for self-harm across teenage girls in the US since 2001 for self-harm:

But nowadays I prefer this one from The Economist showing percentage changes in suicide rates in 17 nations:

Unlike the previous case, this time the discussion is muddier because no one knows exactly what is driving teenage girls and young women to suicide and, out of the likeliest culprits, the ones on top are major multinationals with an iron grip on our societal discourse. The evidence may point to social media and phones being a deadly combination (a point I agree with) but, just like cigarettes before, the companies behind them will have to be dragged kicked and screaming before they even pretend to accept their role, much less their fault.

I understand that the discourse around social media bans for teenagers is tricky, and both sides have good points made in good faith. But my take is simple: we are standing on the bodies of young women, we haven't done anything, and we are running out of ideas. As far as I'm concerned, staying silent is no longer an option.

Honorable mention

While not as life-changing as the previous two, this graph of the global average temperature predictions made by Exxon in 1982 lives rent-free in my head as an example of "anyone who believes oil companies saying there is no human-made global warming is not a normal, cognitively-healthy adult who knows how to read a graph".