Issue 07 Annual Data Review Jan 2026

The Nap Economy: how 48,000 cats spent 2025

A scroll-driven essay from the Meowtrics data desk. Prose drives, the graphics respond — every figure on this page is fictional, every chart is real code.

By Kitty Park, CEO · Data by Ya-ong Kim, CTO · Figures by Calico Lee, Head of Design

Start the data story Dataset notes

Fig. 01Three indicators of the fictional nap economy, indexed monthly, 2019–2025.

No. 01 · Overview

A year measured in whiskers

In January 2025 the Meowtrics panel crossed 48,212 registered cats, each one napping, climbing, and judging us through an instrumented CatTower. What follows is our annual accounting of that activity: where the hours went, which habits grew, and why the household keyboard remains the most contested surface in the home.

The headline is simple. Hardware growth was strong, but behavior grew faster. For the first time in panel history, logged nap sessions outpaced tower installations on a per-cat basis — a shift our chief technology officer, Ya-ong Kim, calls “the decoupling.” The sections below walk through it one chart state at a time; methods and caveats are at the end.

Fig. 02

Nap-hours logged by the Meowtrics panel in 2025 — a fictional figure, counted with real affection.

Fig. 03 · Scroll-driven

Four states of one chart

Keep scrolling. The chart on the left holds still while the story advances on the right — each step card you pass mutates the figure: new series, new baseline, new focus.

Fig. 03 · State 01/04

Monitored tower units, 2019–2025

Thousand units in the Meowtrics panel

100

'19

'20

'21

'22

'23

'24

'25 2025 — 9.0 naps per cat per day

Step 01

Hardware first. The panel grew from 18,000 monitored towers in 2019 to 84,000 by the end of 2025 — steady, almost boring growth, the kind a fictional CFO loves.

Step 02

Now add behavior. Logged nap sessions enter the chart in red — and notice the gap closing. By 2024 the cats were napping nearly as fast as we could ship towers.

Step 03

Re-base everything per registered cat and the picture flips. Hardware per cat plateaus, while naps per cat keep climbing — the decoupling, in one mutation.

Step 04

Focus on 2025: 9.0 naps per cat per day, the highest reading in panel history. The rest of the decade dims; this is the bar the whole issue is about.

Fig. 04 · Breakout figure

Where 4.8 million nap-hours happened

Window sill

34%

Cat tower

27%

Laundry pile

15%

Keyboard

11%

Sofa arm

Cardboard box

Fig. 04Share of logged nap-hours by location, Meowtrics panel, 2025. Hover or focus a row for absolute hours. All values fictional.

No. 02 · Methods

Sources and caveats

Every series in this issue is generated for demonstration. In the fiction, readings come from three instruments operated across the CatTower network, reconciled nightly by the Meowtrics pipeline and audited by exactly one very skeptical tabby.

SRC 01Meowtrics Panel v4 — 48,212 opted-in cats across 9,400 fictional households.
SRC 02CatTower Bank anonymized treat-ledger, cleared through Pawment Co rails.
SRC 03Whiskr Inc ambient sensor net, sampled at one purr per second.

Corrections may be sent to the desk via the reader line. We regret, in advance, nothing.

Index · More from the desk

Previous essays

Essay 06