152 Days

Let’s say that you spend 20 minutes per day on social media.  That’s 7,300 minutes per year.  Let’s pretend I do that for the next 30 years.  That’s 219,000 minutes or 3,650 hours.  That’s about 152 days, a little under a half a year of my life within that 30 years period.  Kind of sobering when you think about Facebook that way.

I heard that on a Note to Self episode.  The guest took that number out to two years, 25 minutes per day for the length of the average life span (though I’m going to guess that few babies are online and most people actually use social media more than 20 minutes per day if you add up all the sites).

Manoush was saying that she doesn’t have a Facebook account, and she gave her theory: We join Facebook because we’re scared about death.  We’re scared about admitting that a chapter of our life is over, so we cling to the people from that chapter in life.  And Manoush feels like moving on is important.  Not always looking back or seeing the same people around us.

That fact is why I like social media; because you don’t lose track of people, and if you do, it’s pretty easy to reconnect.  And I like Facebook more than Twitter (and blogs more than Facebook) because it moves at a good speed; not too fast, not too cluttered.  Plus it all comes down to whether I choose to spend my 20 minutes per day online or not.  It’s not as if those people are living on a commune with me.  I don’t have to use my 20 minutes per day.

It’s an interesting distinction because Manoush is on Twitter and Instagram, two other platforms where you collect people from old areas of your life.

Anyway, 152 days.  Even if I cut my usage down to 10 minutes per day, it’s 76 days.

Though if it makes you feel any better, if you cook on average for an hour per day, you spend almost 456 days of that 30 year period cooking.  And no one thinks twice about pulling together a bowl of pasta.