If you scroll for about 3 hours every day, that is 1.25 years over the next ten years, and 2.5 years over twenty. Here is the receipt, line by line, and what the same time could be.
3 hours of scrolling a day is 1,096 hours a year. Expressed in full 24-hour days it is 45.7 days, which is easier to feel: it is the length of a long holiday, spent in roughly 180-minute pieces you will not remember individually.
Over ten years the same habit is 10,958 hours. That is enough time to read about 1,826 books at six hours each, to learn 21 languages to a conversational level (roughly 500 hours each), or to watch every episode of Friends 125.9 times.
The world average for social media is about 2 hours 20 minutes a day (DataReportal, Digital 2025). 3 hours a day is 29% above that average, which puts you in the "Committed" tier on the receipt. The tier names are a joke; the numbers are not.
Cutting just 30 minutes a day from 3 hours gives back 7.6 days a year and 76 days over ten years, without changing anything else. Cutting it to one hour a day would return 30.4 days a year. None of this is advice; it is arithmetic you can act on or ignore.
iPhone: Settings → Screen Time → See All App & Website Activity, weekly view, add up social and entertainment apps and divide by seven. Android: Settings → Digital Wellbeing → Dashboard. Then print your own receipt and send it to the friend who claims they "barely use their phone".
Other amounts: 30 minutes · 1 hour · 1.5 hours · 2 hours · 2.5 hours · 4 hours · 5 hours · 6 hours · 8 hours.