What Spending 12 Billion Hours Per Day On Social Media Has Taught Us

We all have a lot to say, apparently.

Over the last 10 years or so, more and more social media users have grabbed their digital blow-horns and announced what they don’t like about their current flight, the sushi place near their home, and the person speaking during a political debate. (By the way, it’s almost always what we don’t like, since we all have a natural inclination to be negative.)

The result is that we’re now spending over 12 billion hours on social media per day, all over the world.

I read that stat in a new book called STFU: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World by Dan Lyons. Actually, the book mentions 10 billion hours per day on social media, but when I looked up the source, the actual data has increased to 12 billion hours (or the equivalent of 1.4 million years).

This might be a good time to ask why that is.

Lyons says it’s because we are all too talkative, and I tend to agree. We post about the local sports team, then we complain about the weather. I tend to gravitate to the comments on Facebook posts and replies on Twitter, especially when it’s something controversial. I’ve become really good at predicting what people will say in comments.

In a recent Facebook video about a dad teaching his child how to jump up onto a table — which has thousands of comments — I knew that most people would complain about how the child might fall. That’s true. But do we need a thousand comments complaining about it? If 999 of those people had checked the first comment, they could have just noted how that’s been covered and moved on to something else. That might save about a million hours right there.

The book by Dan Lyons does an excellent job of explaining what to do about this problem. I like all of his tips in the chapter on social media, but my favorite is the one where he says to WAIT. It’s actually an acronym, which stands for Why Am I Tweeting? That question might give some of us pause.

In just one recent example, I posted a link to an article of mine about Greta Thunberg. Someone decided to comment almost right away, saying a recent book of mine (about seven-minute productivity routines) is a gimmick.

Okay? Sure? I guess the question I would ask is, how did this person read my book in five seconds? And what does that really have to do with Greta Thunberg? (By the way, I often wonder if people regret what they say on social media since, you know, the book took about 18 months to write. Lyons mentions regret, too. However, what we regret is that we spent the time using the apps at all, not that we complained.)

Here’s where things stand right now. I think the reason we post so often on social media is because we can post. The tools are incredibly easy to use. To make a TikTok video, you need a phone. We all have one of those these days. To comment, you need a social media account and about five seconds of time.

Lyons also mentions the idea of throttling our posting and commenting. Imagine that! Self-discipline and self-control, setting our phones down once in a while, not posting.

What we have learned over the last 10 years and 12 billion hours per day of social media usage is that we don’t usually have self-control, that we post far too often.

I doubt we really have that much to say. Lyons comes to the conclusion in his book that we should all start learning to listen more, and that talking constantly just shows we don’t really have that much to say after all.