By Clarissa Olson Posted November 13, 2018
Social media and the internet were wonderful things when they launched. People all over the world could talk to each other no matter what language they spoke. You could answer any question you could possibly have with the touch of a button. What was once a wonderful, life-changing tool has become an addiction.
“The amount of time people spend on social media is constantly increasing,” said Evan Asano of ‘Social Media Today’.“Teens now spend up to nine hours a day on social platforms.” When some of my friends and I are together, they’re on their phones the entire time. Sometimes it feels like the only times they ever talk to me is when they’re proud of a selfie. How about friends being too busy to hang out because they’ve got a “date with Netflix”? Facebook, Netflix, Instagram, and Pinterest will all be here tomorrow. They’ll be around even when we’re dead and buried, yet we put them over our friends and family who could be gone when we wake up in the morning. Sounds like quite the list of priorities, doesn’t it?
The average American spends 5 years and 4 months of their life on social media. In that amount of time, you could walk your dog 93 thousand times, or climb Mount Everest 32 times. That’s enough time to do your homework 3,292 times over on a heavy day or for 20,736,000 turns in a real-life conversation. Lincoln could recite the Gettysburg Address 345,600 times. Imagine what life, or even the world, would be like if we spent even a fraction of that time on that science project that tanked our grades. What would you give to have another five years and four months with a loved one who passed and you will never see again? If only you hadn’t wasted it all scrolling through posts that will never really matter.
The haze of social media and the internet has blinded us to the things that really matter in life. What’s the point in taking hundreds of selfies trying to get that perfect angle, when it only takes a second to smile at a real person in the real world? The time we spend on social media “having a life,” is actually preventing us from living our lives, yet our heads are buried so deeply in our phones that we will never see the problem.
