How Social Media Literally Shortens Your Lifespan
Yes, you read that right.
Social media shortens your lifespan.
Not in the way smoking does.
But your perception of time is detrimentally affected by its consumption, which ultimately leads to, in a sense, shortening your lifespan.
To understand this, you must first understand how time works and how we make sense of it.
The physics of time
Essentially, there is a difference between experienced and remembered time. Experienced time is the subjective sense of time of an event in the present moment. Remembered time is the subjective sense of time of an event that you remember from the past.
Both behave like a seesaw to each other. When the present moment seems to go by within the blink of an eye (for instance when you spend time with someone you love), we remember it rich in memory. Likewise, when the present doesn’t want to end (for instance when you are sitting in the doctor’s waiting room), we remember it as a shortened period.
You can check out the first article of my time series, if you are interested in a more detailed explanation.
Besides this seesaw interaction, we today more than ever have perfect means to shorten the time in the present moment and from our memory.
Time killer social media
Unless you have stern discipline and never touched a mobile device, chances are high you can relate to the following scenario:
You open Instagram to see what’s new, check what funny videos your friends just sent you. You watch another two or three and before you know it, you’re caught up in an unconscious state of mindless scrolling. An incoming call lets you return from zombie mode, you check the time and to your astonishment 1.5 hours just flew by.
If you want to envision the time you spend on social media a few days later, it seems to have disappeared without trace. The videos you watched a couple of days prior mean so little to you that your brain didn’t even remember a handful of them.
The images it was bombarded with displaced time in the present; and their irrelevance erased time in retrospect.
This is an often overlooked effect of social media: Not only does it cost time that could have been better invested, but it also creates a zone without memory.
The same holds true for other media such as television or computer games.
Still not convinced?
If that didn’t sound alarming enough to rethink your screen time, let me show you the following statistic of how time is spent apart from work.
Yes, you read that right.
Social media use and watching TV combined takes up 15 years of your life.
What struck me even more was the fact socializing takes such a little spot in our lives. That social media alone takes up three times as much as lifetime as socialising should be enough reason to make us reflect on our daily social media use.
Ask yourself:
Do I want to continue sending my valuable and finite lifetime down the drain like stagnant water? Or do I take responsibility and spend it more consciously and make it more meaningful?
