By Angelica Schmidt
After stumbling upon a video saying that the average person in 2024 will spend 10 years of their lives scrolling through their phone, I was inspired to dive deeper into the claim knowing how easily misinformation can spread online.
An article I found, “Time Spent Using Smartphones (2024 Statistics)” by Josh Howarth, confirmed that the average person will spend around 4 hours and 40 minutes on their phone per day, which adds up to about 70 days per year. If the average lifespan is 77.5 years, then, according to the data, the average person will spend about (77.5 x 70)/ 365 = 14.863 or approximately 15 years in total on their phone.
In other words, 782 weeks, someone will spend moving their thumb across a screen. Up and down, left and right. Over and over again.
5,475 nights. The number of nights someone will be rocked to sleep by trending audios and videos of people doing whatever pops up on their ForYou Page. Letting their malnourished brains rot and shrivel, until they become utterly consumed by the familiar and tantalizing blue light.
131,400 hours per lifetime. Which is how long someone will spend over the course of their entire lives losing themselves in endless whirlpools of meaningless content by merely spending just 4 hours and 40 minutes per day on their phone. Which is most likely how long you either are about to spend, or have already spent online.
4 or 5 hours per day can very quickly turn into 15 years of your life, spent staring into a little black box. Does that sound like something you actually want to do? The choice is yours so choose wisely.
Our school average, based on the people who helpfully shared with me their personal screen time, averaged out to be around 6 hours and 7 minutes per day. Imagine what else you could do with that extra time.
4 or 5 hours per day will very quickly turn into 15 years of your life. But only if you allow it to. Take back control. Take back your time.
