Why I Deleted All Social Media

Oskar Volčanšek
Feb 19, 2024
2 min read

How much time do you spend in front of screens every day? If you're like most people, the answer is probably too much.

In October, when I was on an exchange in Portugal, I was walking around the city with a classmate and we were reminiscing about the time of the corona and the time before it. This was in October 2023, so almost four years after the corona. We asked ourselves what each of us had been doing during that time, and our answers were almost the same. During the quarantine, I woke up, ate, did the bare minimum for school, and then played video games all day. It's true that I went for a walk almost every day, but I spent hours on the phone and computer. So my classmate and I agreed to do an experiment for the duration of the exchange: we would delete all social media from our phones, with some exceptions.

How much time does the average adult spend on their phone?

In 2023, 60% of the world's population, or 4.8 billion people, used social media. Of these, the most widely used social networks are those owned by Meta (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) with 2.96 billion active monthly users.

The average person spends an average of 2 hours and 24 minutes per day on social media, not including other forms of screens. This amounts to 864 hours per year, which is 36 days or just over a month per year. In most cases, this is time wasted, and exclusively on social media.

If we convert these numbers over a lifetime, with an expected average global life expectancy of 73.4 years and initial use at age eight, this amounts to 6.4 years of our lives.

But these horrific findings don't end there, as they only include data on average mobile phone use. What about all the other screens? If we look at the average American, they spend an average of 7 hours and four minutes on screens per day. This translates to 2,555 hours per year, which is 106 days or just over three months per year.

What about teenagers?

The average time spent on social media is even higher for teenagers than for adults. On average, they spend 4.8 hours per day on social media. The average time that teenagers spend on all screens is 8 hours and 39 minutes per day, which is almost an hour and forty minutes more than the average adult.

How people falsely justify their social media use

Fear of missing out (FOMO) is a common reason - the fear that we'll miss something if we don't read the latest article, see our friends' new posts, or check the latest news of the day. But the truth is, we don't really miss anything. Social media posts don't affect our lives, and most importantly, the time we save can be spent on things we really want to achieve - reading that book that's been sitting on the shelf for years, developing an idea that's been living somewhere in the back of our heads, or simply spending more time for ourselves.

Gaining knowledge online

One of the arguments we use to justify our use of social media is gaining new knowledge online, and that's a perfectly good argument, since the web is the largest library of knowledge in the world. But we have to ask ourselves how much time we actually spend looking for reliable information and how much time we waste mindlessly browsing social media.

What to do?

First we have to ask ourselves what we want to achieve. Personally, I have and still am striving to reduce my social media use as much as possible. I have also achieved this, I usually spend about an hour a day on my phone. I did this by simply deleting all social media from my phone. And I suggest you do the same.

What about the new found time?

If you've happened to get rid of unnecessary browsing at this point, you may be wondering what to do with the free time. I started reading more, and now for almost five months I've been reading at least 20 pages a day. I've also started training for a Triathlon, which requires six workouts a week, each taking at least an hour and a half to two hours. This year, I've also started writing a blog, which also takes some time. Finally, I've finally started developing my own product, which I want to use to start my own business.

Conclusion

Deleting the social network from my phone was one of the best decisions I've made in a long time. I have saved a huge amount of time which I can now spend on the things I want to achieve. If you struggle with excessive use of social networks, I suggest you to give it a try. You might be surprised at how much time you save.