How many years of your life will you spend on your phone?
At 4 hours a day from age 25, an average person spends about 6 calendar years of their remaining life looking at a phone — a quarter of their waking hours. Enter your numbers; the result uses your country’s life expectancy.
76,650 hours in total — 25% of your waking time from now on.
- 12,775 books you could read instead
- 76,650 one-hour workouts
Cut one hour a day and you get 2.2 years back.
How it’s calculated
Years remaining = life expectancy at birth in your country (World Bank, 2022, rounded) minus your age. Total hours = daily hours × 365 × years remaining. “Years of your life” divides that by 8,760 hours in a calendar year. The waking-time share assumes 16 waking hours a day.
Books assume 6 hours per book; workouts assume one hour each. It is an estimate meant to make an abstract number concrete, not a forecast. Your daily hours are in iPhone Settings › Screen Time.
Questions
Is that calendar years or waking years?
Calendar years — 24-hour days. Counting only waking hours (16 a day) the number is 1.5× bigger.
Where do I find my daily hours?
iPhone: Settings › Screen Time › See All App & Website Activity. Use the weekly daily average.
Why does Cortex app publish this?
Because the same number is the first thing the app shows you after onboarding. Cortex app then adds a pause before the apps that eat those hours — a pause, not a block.
Get some of it back — free for one app
5.0 ★ on the App Store · iOS 17+