How much time do you reckon you’ve spent on social media in the last year?

Indeed, your entire life?

If you knew how much time, it would scare you. I mean, let’s face it, it’s probably not an insignificant amount. But could you imagine what you might have accomplished if you’d spent that time differently? Maybe a new Guiness record in number of read books.

Now, I’m not claiming that the time spent on social media is always unproductive. It’s arguable that there certainly is time that is useful and that social media can be productive in some circumstances — such as keeping in touch with family members or acquaintances living abroad - and social media networks make it easier to keep in touch.

But let’s be honest with ourselves now, most of the time you spend on social media time is probably not productive. Whether you lose five hours at a time, or even just half an hour all day, it adds up.

Just do the math for a second: 30 minutes each day for a whole week equals 3.5 hours.

Just think what else you could have done with those 3.5 hours.

Or what if you’re the type who spends 5 hours per day on social media? Man, I don’t wanna even do that math.

I mean, you get the picture. Social media networks (especially their master, Facebook), have been carefully designed to keep you hooked. From notifications, tags, … were thoughtfully put in place to keep you enslaved to the website — addicted to interactions, and to make your mind crave interactions and updates in the feed every time you get bored. The calculation is simple - the more time you spend there, there more money they can make with it.

Whereas you? You’re just passing time.

However, we’re just halfway there.

There is a nice reminder waiting for me every time I login in my Facebook. It says:

You owe $40.34 dollars to Facebook. Because my credit card expired before they were able to charge for the last ad spent on my personal account.

And I haven’t added a new credit card yet on purpose.

Why? Because it feels wrong.

It never says how much Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg owns me. Probably because the amount of the time, and the content that I produced and published on the platform would result in a multiple factor of the amount I own them.

The other day I had a productive conversation with my friend Sebastien. We both concluded that while there certainly can be useful time spent on social media, it would be much wiser to spend the rest of the energy building your own website.

You know, instead of Facebook publishing the content there.

So here it is. From now on I will share my thoughts on certain philosophically critical and questionable topics ranging from the internet, a vision of the future and social observations on this blog.

And I would encourage everyone do the same. In the end, Facebook was not designed to serve you honestly, to repay content creators what they deserve for making the platform valuable.

And for that reason, it shouldn’t stay there for much longer. The future is bright without it.