Your digital life
Younger generations are getting sucked into the processes of binge-watching, wall-scrolling, picture-sharing over actually living IRL.
There is a lot of comfort at the tip of your finger, but at what price?
Preface
Remember when our parents used to say that watching too much TV is not good, or staying at the computer may harm our health?
I'm not sure they really understood the scope of what they were actually implying at that time.
Have you ever stop to ponder about the effects of Netflix-like services and social media apps have on your mental state and habits?
Have you ever considered that they can have actual physical implications in your real life?
Have you done any of the following too often in the past?
Over eating, depression, anxiety over failure, anxiety over trying to achieve anything, mid life crisis, behaved like they had some sort of premature existential life crisis, extreme overthinking, rumination, extremely critical views, over-sharing intimate and sometimes trivial life moments.
Our digital overlords
Google started as a search engine in 1998, their service started to make an impact in our lives from '99. But it wasn't until they purchased Youtube in 2006 that Google really started creeping in our daily recreative activities.
Netflix is a pretty "new" company, and in 2014 they started wider global expansion according to Wikipedia.
Twitter was founded in 2006, Reddit in 2005, Facebook in 2006 (publicly), Instagram in 2010, etc.
Now we also have this faster-than-light social media platform called TikTok (aka Douyin in China) which started having a global impact in 2020.
Amazon Prime Video was launched world wide in 2016.
If you happen to be a gamer or like live streaming, you probably know Twitch which started being popular in early 2014.
My precious time
According to Business Insider, a Netflix subscriber watches an average of 2 hours / day. That's average!
That means 730 hours / year. And that is not "binge watching".
Facebook doesn't post about these kind of statistics, but they made the numbers available for those interested inside the FB App -> " Your Time on Facebook".
A year has 8760 hours.
If you sleep well and healthy, that means 8h / day, then we need to reduce 2920 hours of sleep from the total.
8760 - 2920 = 5840 hours for daily activities in one year
We spend 261 working days a year if we have a regular full-time job.
I'll remove 30 days for personal time off and sick days.
So 231 working days of 9h/day (including launch), meaning that you spend 2079 hours a year doing your job.
5840 - 2079 = 3761 hours for daily activities in one year
Plenty, one might say, but now use the "Digital life calculator" sheet and add the time in hours.
Feel free to add more activities (eg. family, kids) and see in the end how many hours you got left for yourself to pursue whatever dreams or passions or activities you want.