How much time do you spend a day on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram? About 20 minutes? An hour? Two hours?

Here is the shocking news: Adults spend about one hour and 45 minutes a day on social media, according to a study released last year by Global Media Index, a London-based market research firm. Teenagers spend an average of nine hours a day with media, mostly watching TV, according to a study by Common Sense Media, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization focused on children and media. This is more time than teens usually spend studying in school or sleeping.

If that doesn’t sound absurd yet, imagine how shocking the numbers become over time. Every year, adults spend about 27 days a year on social media, or about seven years in a typical lifetime! Teenagers spend about 140 days a year with some form of media or another, or about 25 years in a lifetime! 

That’s an almost unbelievable amount of time wasted. It’s lost time, and time is limited for every single person! Sometimes, we think it’s okay because we -- adults and children -- do work while multitasking with media, but studies by Common Sense Media show that we spend only 65% of our time doing the primary task we intended to do when we multitask.

Thus, I believe, our most wasted resource, as a society, is time with the possible saving grace only being a more wired environment than, say, 50 years ago. But we should choose real life -- like  learning, working, writing, reading or meeting friends face-to-face -- rather than reading about others engaged directly in life because, when we do, we are wasting our most valuable commodity: our time.