11680 hours in 8 years.
Does that mean 4 hours a day? Or – in total 486 days? More than a year?
What is this guy talking about you might ask? I woke up this morning just as always quite early but realised that the first thing I did was turning off the flight mode and opening up Instagram to scroll through. Like absolutely NOTHING important at all. Just consuming.
Ok, cool story bro, get to the point. I figured I would calculate super roughly the amount of time that I spent on social media since I got my first phone. It is crazy! In eight years I lost one year, just staring at the screen consuming other people’s posts. God, imagine what I could have been doing with all that time.
Looking back I wish I would have just used these platforms to release my brain, and post stuff I create. Without caring about likes, interactions, whatsoever. This is actually the part, where the most amount of time gets lost. Posting itself, creating, etc. – probably took about 5-10% of those numbers. Means 90% of the time was a pure waste of time. Ok, maybe give another 5-10% for inspiration. But that’s it.
The worst part about it: the more you consume, the worse you feel. There’s always someone posting a picture on this perfectly photoshopped beach somewhere on this beautiful planet. Who wouldn’t want to be there? Instead of living in the NOW and being happy with what we are surrounded by, we are spending loads of time following other people’s lives and feeling miserable about our own.
The way I look at social media is quite simple. It’s a great tool to connect, interact and share your own story. But I guess our generation needs to learn how to value time and real life discussions different again.
Time is everyone’s number one asset.
Think about it.