Which Generation Is Most Dependent on Smartphones? (Hint: They're Young.) How smartphone-dependent are you, compared with your age group?
By Sherin Shibu Edited by Dan Bova
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This story originally appeared on PCMag
The average American will spend a staggering nine years of their life on their smartphone.
Smartphone use has been on the rise since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic—it's about 45% above normal levels. Users are messaging, calling, browsing the internet, and checking their social media on their mobile devices.
Phone plan search engine WhistleOut conducted a new study in relation to this trend. It researched how much time Americans spend on their smartphones by generation and how that time adds up. For reference, millennials were born between 1981 and 1996, Generation X between 1965 and 1980, and boomers between 1946 and 1964.
Related: The Endless Scroll: How to Tell if You're a Tech Addict
Daily phone screen time, unsurprisingly, varies across generations, with millennials spending the most time on their phones (3.7 hours a day), Gen X following (3 hours), and boomers spending the least (2.5 hours). This means millennials spend around 56 days each year on their phones; boomers spend 39 days.
When you factor out average sleeping time for all three groups (an impressive 9 hours!), millennials spend nearly a quarter of the day (23.1%) on their phones. Gen X is a bit better, with 16.5% of their waking lives spent scrolling through their phones. Boomers spend only 9.9% of their day on their phones.
So where do you fall? Are your phone habits aligned with your generation? Or do you veer to the extreme: tech addiction?
