Just close your eyes and imagine, you’re on a break at the office, waiting at the bus stop, waiting for a meeting or just sitting alone… You take your phone out of your pocket, the app opens and immediately your thumb or fingers start moving. Scroll, scroll, and then… scroll some more!
This is the new habit of our daily lives, which has become so common that we may not even notice it now, but if we stop and think about it, this harmless habit is actually making our fingers travel long distances. Yes, in kilometers!
Let’s do some interesting, if not scientific, calculations to see how far our thumbs travel in the world of social media on a daily, weekly, or annual basis. Beware! These figures may surprise you.
108 minutes a day… just scrolling?
According to a report by Statista, the average user worldwide spends about 108 minutes a day scrolling on social media. In the UK, mobile phone usage has reached 4 hours a day, and a large part of that is spent scrolling. And keep in mind, we’re only talking about averages here.
So the question is, do we really get that far just by twiddling our thumbs?
Just do the math: How much could a thumb travel daily? Let’s make a simple estimate:
You spend about two hours on your mobile every day. If we just look at the scrolling process, it is estimated that every five seconds you scroll down about 30 centimeters with your finger.
Now think about it, if all the scrolls throughout the day were added up, your finger would travel about 389 meters per day. This distance is like walking on a sidewalk, the only difference is that your finger, not your legs, travels this distance on the screen of your mobile phone!
Yes! Your finger or thumb travels 0.39 kilometers every day, without wearing shoes, without taking a breath!
We saw that your finger travels about 389 meters while scrolling every day. Now expand on this concept, what if this process continued for a week, a month, or a year?
Let’s do the math. Your finger travels about two and a half kilometers in a week. That’s about as far as someone goes for a walk in the park.
In a month? Now the distance increases, more than twelve kilometers. It means a cycle like someone walking from one corner of the city to the other. But you were just following with a sliding finger on Insta, Facebook or YouTube.
And do you know how much distance this covers throughout the year? Here it gets even more amazing, your finger has traveled about 142 kilometers! This is the same distance as three marathons.
That is, if someone asks you if you run marathons throughout the year, you can now tell them, “No, I don’t. But my fingers definitely do it while scrolling on my mobile, every day, regularly!”
What if you want to travel around the world just by scrolling?
Suppose you scroll on your mobile screen with just your finger as much as the average user does today, which is about 0.39 kilometers per day.
Now imagine circling the Earth? Let’s do some math. The Earth’s circumference is about 40,075 kilometers. So it would take you 103,000 days to complete this journey just by scrolling! That’s about 282 years. (That’s enough time that Instagram might have been replaced by ‘Time Travelgram’!)
And what if you want to go to the moon? The moon is 384,400 km away from us. So it would take about 2708 years to reach there just by scrolling. (By then, papad and biryani shops might have opened on the moon!)
And if the target is Mars? The average distance to Mars is 225 million kilometers. So… it would take 1.6 million years to reach there while sitting and scrolling! Your finger will reach Mars, but your neck will have sunk into the ground with your mobile phone bent!
Scrolling on Route 66?
Suppose you set out on a ‘thumb march’ on the world’s most famous American highway, ‘Route 66’, at a normal speed of just 0.39 km/h, which has a total length of about 3,940 km, then it would take you 10,133 days, or about 27.8 years.
That means if you were running a mobile app in 1998, your little one would have traveled the same distance as Route 66 today!
Scrolling length? As long as a Shaquille O’Neal!
Do you know Shaquille O’Neal? The giant star of the National Basketball Association NBA, who is 7 feet 1 inch tall.
Now just think, if you scroll about 30 centimeters on your mobile phone screen every 5 seconds, in just 8 minutes you will have ‘traveled’ the length of a Shaquille O’Neal!
So the next time you’re scrolling on your phone, ask yourself, “How many Shaquille O’Neal jumps did I do today?” And yes, if you spend fifteen to twenty minutes scrolling throughout the day, you’ve probably watched an entire NBA game!
Fun or Exhaustion? The Reality of ‘Scroll Thumb’
Although scrolling may seem like a simple movement, ‘scroll thumb’ or ‘texting thumb’ is a medical condition that can cause pain, spasm, and swelling in the thumb joint from constant scrolling.
Eye strain, sleep disturbances, neck pain, and mental stress are all among the possible effects of prolonged screen time.
Most importantly: a waste of time. That same time we could have invested in a new skill, friends, or exercise.
The next time you start scrolling on your mobile phone screen, stop and think, “Where have I been so far? And did I really want to go there?”
We’re not saying you should give up your mobile. The internet, social media and apps have become an integral part of our lives, be it for communication, business or information.
What is important is moderation. Spend a few moments a day without screens, adopt a ‘digital detox’ habit, sometimes just look at the sky. It doesn’t send ‘notifications’, but it says a lot.