Cat Census notes · 4 min read
Am I normal? The real numbers on twelve things people do when nobody's looking
You suspect you're the only one who does it. Usually you're in a crowd, and sometimes the crowd is most people.
01The bathroom and the bedroom
Start with the big one. In a 2014 YouGov poll, 62% of Americans said they pee in the shower. If you do, you're in the majority. If you don't, you share a bathroom with someone who does.
The bed is less flattering for the tidy. YouGov found in 2018 that 37% of Americans make their bed every day. The rest have decided it's going to get messed up again anyway, which is hard to argue with.
And the clothes chair, the one that holds everything too clean to wash and too worn to put away? A ClosetMaid survey by OnePoll put it at 49% of people. It's basically a coin flip whether your partner has one too.
02Phones, from the moment you wake up
Deloitte's 2016 mobile survey found 43% of Americans check their phone within five minutes of waking up. That was 2016. Make of the current number what you will.
Unknown numbers get the opposite treatment. Pew Research found in 2020 that only about one in five Americans always answer calls from numbers they don't recognize. Your car's extended warranty will have to wait.
03Work, money and small moral tests
An Accountemps survey in 2018 found 45% of workers had cried at work. The office bathroom has heard a lot.
Pew found in 2023 that about half of US workers with paid time off use all of it. The other half are leaving free days on the table, which the first half finds hard to understand.
Spot a penny on the street? A 2025 YouGov poll found half of Americans always pick it up. The other half walk past, and nobody has settled whether that's dignity or a missed opportunity.
Then the big trade. Researchers at Penn and UCLA asked thousands of people in 2016 whether they'd rather have more money or more time. 64% picked money. The same research found the people who picked time tended to be happier, which is annoying for everyone in the 64%.
04The ones everyone argues about
Is a hot dog a sandwich? In a YouGov food poll, 38% said it is. That's a big enough minority to ruin a barbecue.
And the driving one. AAA found in 2018 that 73% of American drivers consider themselves better than average. That math doesn't work, and that's the point. A 1981 study by Ola Svenson found the same thing, and decades later we still haven't adjusted.
05Why it feels lonelier than it is
It's easy to underestimate how common their private habits are, because private habits are the ones nobody mentions. You only see other people's public behavior, so your own quirks look rarer than they are. The numbers above are the fix: a little proof that the crowd is bigger than it looks from inside your own head.
06See where you land
Cat Census asks you questions like these, one at a time, and a crowd of cats splits to show where everyone else answered. The first 25 are free. Somewhere around the end of the first chapter, one of the cats decides you're theirs.
Cat Census
Answer questions about yourself and watch a crowd of cats take sides. One of them is picking you.