English Version | Spoil Me: The time of our lives

The figures presented here have been collated from various statistical studies and reflect averages based on average life expectancy in countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States of America and Portugal. There's no point in adding up the figures to conclude that we live an average of 132 years. What is presented here are estimated trends that help us look at the cake of our lives broken into slices of different thicknesses.

A day in the life

• In the West, we spend three years of our lives on social media.
• We spend 10,625 days looking at the screens of technological devices – smartphones, computers, etc. – These 10,625 days are 29 years and one month, more or less. According to Texas A&M University, the average American spends 38 hours a year stuck in traffic (in large metropolises such as Los Angeles or Chicago, this figure can exceed 60 hours a year).
• According to a US study, we spend 27 days of our lives waiting for public transport.
• In other words, if a person has to travel (to work, for example) for 30 years, 38 hours a year means 47 and a half days. Conclusion: it's better to wait for public transport, you waste less of your life.
• In Portugal, the average citizen devotes five minutes a day to a spiritual activity, such as praying. That's around 30 hours a year. After 60 years, that's 75 full days.
• When it comes to physical exercise, studies differ: some point to half a year of exercise over a lifetime; others go further and say that we exercise for an average of one year and four months.

In the bathroom

• If we follow dentists' recommendations and brush our teeth twice a day for two minutes at a time, we spend 83 days of our lives brushing our teeth.
• We spend twice as long in the shower if we take an average of eight minutes a day: that's 166 days of our life down the drain.
• Men spend around 285 days of their lives on the toilet. Women spend around 225.

Restful living

• According to the OECD, 26 years of our lives are spent sleeping.
• But that's not the worst of it: a Canadian study says that we spend seven years lying in bed trying to fall asleep.
• We still spend 7,709 days of our lives sitting down (at home, at work, in the car), which corresponds to just over 21 years. Cross-referencing the studies, unless we take the opportunity to sleep while sitting, we begin to realise that perhaps our lives aren't as full as we thought.
• We spend three years on holiday – most of which, it's good to see, is spent either sitting, sleeping or doing both.
• As far as leisure is concerned, the Portuguese have good figures: a total of 61 days a year are dedicated to what gives us pleasure, at the rate of four hours a day. Over a lifetime, that's around 11 years of leisure. Not bad.

At the table

• In the UK, the average citizen spends four years and six months eating.
• The Portuguese spend five years and two months at the table, eating and drinking.
• The average American spends four years and four months on meals. No wonder they invented the concept of fast food.

Men vs. women

• We spend 117 days of our lives having sex. Do you think this number is exaggerated? Think about it.
• Excluding those that are the result of self-inflicted pleasure, orgasms make up a total of nine hours in a man's life, at an average of 12.4 seconds per event.
• In the same way, i.e. not solo, women, whose orgasms last longer than men's, have only an hour and a half of satisfaction throughout their lives. Something isn't quite right.
• Now, yes: masturbation. According to PornHub – yes, yes, of course, you don't know what PornHub is, we'll explain: it's a digital platform dedicated to pornography, that's it – users spend an average of 10 minutes and 13 seconds a day on the site. That's two and a half days a year (the figures for teenagers are, unsurprisingly, much higher: 10 months over the course of adolescence). At the end of life, on average, a human being will have spent more time watching pornography than having sex with other people.

Restful living

• Children under 6 logically demand a lot of time from their carers. But this time is still not evenly distributed: women spend around 100 minutes a day, while men spend no more than 27.
• Men often complain about the time they spend waiting for their wives to hurry up, to finish getting ready, putting on make-up, choosing their clothes, in short, thinking they look good enough to present themselves to the world. With reason? Without reason? In total, each woman spends an average of 136 days getting ready over the course of her life.
• Men invest 46 days for the same purpose (and, we speculate, 70 per cent of that time is spent looking for the damn other sock, where it's gone, it seems to evaporate).
• Men spend four months of their lives shaving. Well, that's an average. All it takes is a walk through our city centres to realise that this may not be the case.
• A woman spends a year of her life choosing clothes to buy (spending eight and a half years shopping).
• Women also invest in hair care: it's a year and five months of dedication over a lifetime.
• The Portuguese spend an average of 38.2 years working: men 39.6 years, women 36.8 years.
• However, if we talk about unpaid work – household chores, for example – the roles are reversed (the dramatic thing is that it's no surprise). On average, women spend five hours and 46 minutes a day on unpaid tasks, while men spend just over an hour and a half on them.

Translated from the original on "What's Next" issue, published December 2024. Full credits and stories in the print issue.