How much of your lifetime are you spending towards digital distractions?
This happens to me all the time. Does this sound familiar?
I’m working on a task. I go to Youtube to watch a video on a related topic. Then I see a related recommended video, so I watch it. This happens a few more times. Maybe I find the video so entertaining that I go on Facebook to send it to my friend. Then all of a sudden, 3 hours later, I’m in deep and I’ve accomplished about 5% of my task.
If something similar has happened to you, know that you’re not alone. This wasn’t coincidental. It was designed by the products we use every day. We’re in, what we call, the Golden Age of Distractions. If you’re curious about learning more about the Golden Age of Distractions, visit our site.
This happens so quickly and so frequently that it’s easy to not think too much about it. But, have you ever thought about the long term effect?
In this blog, I’m going to do the math and see how our current day distractions quantitatively impact us across our lifetime. Don’t quote me because everyone’s different and there’s a large number of variables, but just like math class, I’ll show my work.
Setting up the problem
Our sample population
Upon research, Generation Z and millennials spend the most time on the internet. We’ll use this as our population.
Time spent towards digital distractions
When diving into where this population is spending the most time, I identified social media and online gaming as the biggest time sinks.
For social media, this population is spending anywhere from 2.5–6 hours a day.
For gaming, this population spends 2–3 hours a day.
For our problem, we’ll take the average and define time spent towards digital distractions as 4 hours a day. For simplicity, we’ll also take this as a flat trend and assume that for the rest of their lives, they will spend 4 hours a day towards digital distractions.
Number of years in a lifetime
According to the World Bank, the average life expectancy in the United States is 78 years. We’ll also assume that this population begins their digital distractions at the age of 13 (the minimum age you can be to sign up for major social networking sites).
Therefore, we’ll use the number of years in a lifetime in which digital distractions are present as 65 years.
Summary
Calculation
This means that 4 hours of digital distractions a day has a long term effect of:
3,934 days spent towards digital distractions across a lifetime.
10.80 years spent towards digital distractions across a lifetime.
I hope you didn’t take this too literally, BUT I hope you did reflect a little on how you compare. Like mentioned above, everyone’s different and there’s a large number of variables. But, it’s just something to think about.
