Well this is depressing: A new study, albeit one by a marketing agency that may have reason to pump up the numbers, suggests that the average, connected, modern human is going to waste five full years of their precious life scanning and posting to social media. Five years and four months, in fact. According to Mediakix, the average person is going to spend one year and seven months on Facebook, one year and two months on Snapchat — assuming this hypothetical person actually uses both platforms — eight months on Instagram, and a year and ten months watching things on YouTube. In some bad news for Twitter, they estimate that people only spend about one minute a day on Twitter, which only adds up to 18 days over a lifetime.

As AdWeek notes, this means that if these figures are near accurate, the average in our contemporary age is going to spend more of their life on social media than they will eating and drinking. And enough time scanning their newsfeeds and watching cats riding Roombas that they could have climbed Mount Everest 32 times instead, if they weren't so addicted.

The only thing we're likely to do more of in our lifetime? Watching TV. We'll be spending seven years and eight months doing that.

The agency cites various sources including YouTube's own user statistics and Business Insider pieces about Facebook and Snapchat use, so the only consolation here is that every person is not quite so active on Facebook, Snapchat, Insta, and Twitter on the daily — most of us prefer just one or two of the above. This is also all the more reason not to take up Snapchatting if you haven't already, and perhaps take some well deserved Facebook breaks now and again.

Spending on social media advertising is expected to hit $36 billion this year, about a third of that in the US and Canada alone.

The saddest figure here, though, if we can trust it, is that this average person is going to spend five times as much time on social media in their life than they will socializing with live, breathing people. Socializing, according to this study, is only going to take up one year and three months total.

We can only hope that a backlash against being too engaged with your devices kicks in in the next decade, and/or some new magical technology comes along that eclipses everything that came before it so we don't have to imagine ourselves going to our graves as we count up Instagram likes.

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