You Won’t Believe the Sheer Number of Days a Year Americans Spend Steaming Content

Moving to the country and into a black hole where internet service is virtually non-existence and cable television is just a pipe dream turned out to be a beautiful thing for my family.

Before moving to the country, my husband and I watched quite a bit of television. We were avid followers of the Chicago series, Law & Order, and others and would often arrange our schedules so that we could catch up on those shows together.

These days, we're lucky if we can stream an entire episode of a show without our internet completely going dark or the show buffering for more than 30 minutes. There's a show I've been watching that has six seasons in total. I've been stuck on season three for over a month. Season three, episode four to be exact.

While we don't have television entertainment to keep us company, we have books and games and woods to walk through and projects to do. I'll admit that when we first realized what we'd walked into living in a place where access to television and the internet were a rarity, I second-guessed our decision, but it turned out to be the best thing for us. We have grown closer as a family and our knowledge about things has grown substantially because we're forced to get off our bums and actually do things.

If you think that you don't spend a crazy amount of time in front of the television, you're probably wrong. You just watch an episode here and episode there, right? Well, all of those episodes add up. As a matter of fact, studies have found that the average person streams eight hours of content every day. In a week, that comes out to 56 hours which turns into 224 hours for the month and roughly 2,688 hours for a year. Still don't think that's very much? 2,688 hours comes out to 112 days. 112 days lost to television each and every year. Let that sink in.

No judgment if television is what helps you get through, what helps you escape or decompress, your mental health outweighs all, but 112 is still so many days of our year spent watching things instead of doing them.