Sr. Rachel Rutgers has a presentation, essay, and 42 pre-calculus problems due tomorrow. The second she walks in through the door of her bedroom, those worries disappear and she forgets about her work that needs to be done. Instead, she plops down on her bed, pulls her covers up, and puts on her current show on Netflix: New Girl. This is how she spends her days after school. Along with Rutgers, teenagers of our generation are spending much more of their lives on Netflix than they realize.
For many students these days, Netflix has become an outlet in which they can forget about their heavy responsibilities and fill their stressed minds with pleasure. While many are perfectly aware that they are using it as a procrastination method, they have no intention of changing their addictive habit. “Every day, I know that I have homework that I should be doing, but Netflix easily distracts me, and once I’m watching, I feel no motivation to complete any school work,” Rutgers said. The accessibility of Netflix is almost effortless, due to the fact that people can download the Netflix app onto their phones and watch anywhere, anytime. The convenience of it makes procrastination incredibly simple.
What most users do not realize is how much time they are actually spending on watching shows, movies, documentaries, etc. on Netflix. According to Digital Stats, the average amount of Netflix content that is watched per day per subscriber is 1.8 hours. That number may seem small, but if subscribers continually watch to that extent every single day, the numbers add up. 1.8 hours per day, 12.6 hours per week, 56.7 hours per month, 680.4 hours per year, and 68,040 hours per 100 years/ your life. If someone kept up with this average for all their life, Netflix would consume approximately 7.8 years of his or her life.
Teenagers, however, watch even more than the average 1.8 hours per day. “Finding out that I could be spending that much of my life watching meaningless shows was really shocking. Realizing that made me rethink watching so much Netflix all the time, so I’m going to try not to watch as much,” Soph. Alex Coy said. A great majority of teenagers would find that if they do the math and add up the hours, they may be just as surprised as Coy. “It honestly doesn’t even feel like I’m spending that much time watching Netflix at the moment. But it’s actually crazy how much of my life I’m wasting on it,” Rutgers said.
In most situations, teenagers will lose track of time while watching Netflix causing them to end up watching hours of shows or movies. “After thinking about it, I realized that I watch at least 2 hours of Netflix every day. Once I did the math, that’s about 360 hours just this school year,” Coy said. “Time just always gets away from me, and before I know it, it’s almost 12 in the morning, and my homework is nowhere near completed.” The time Coy spends on Netflix is even more than the average. The percentage of her life that she spends watching it will be even higher than the statistic.
While many Netflix watchers realize their problem, they often choose to ignore it. It’s much easier, and more enjoyable, to watch five episodes of One Tree Hill than it is to write an essay. “I remember one night during first semester when I had an essay due the next day, but I just couldn’t stop watching New Girl, and I ended up having to stay awake until 2:00 A.M just to finish my paper. The worst part is, I haven’t learned my lesson, and I still procrastinate school work using Netflix,” Rutgers said.
For this generation, it has become common for Netflix to take up a lot of our time, yet teens do not think much of it. When many teenage users estimate how much time they are spending on Netflix, the numbers are not small at all. Hopefully, teens can realize that they should spend less time on Netflix unless they want to end up wasting years of their life that they will never receive back.
