When did Facebook start taking over our lives?

A year ago, I didn’t have any social media at all. I genuinely didn’t see the point. I saw people on nights out, looking at their phones instead of the people they were with, and taking photos of beautiful things for Instagram instead of actually looking at them. I even wrote an article about how we all needed to put down our social media and live our actual lives – then I came to uni and got Facebook.

I’d love to say that joining social media has opened my eyes to how fantastic the internet really is. I’d like to say that I open up Facebook every day and learn new things and that my friends and I have deep, philosophical debates over Messenger. But I can’t say that, because it’s 100 per cent not true. Most of my internet time is spent talking about nonsense, or being tagged in videos of pugs in costumes. Half of my group chats only come alive when someone gets drunk, and I’m ashamed to say that I even get sucked in by Buzzfeed quizzes which promise that they can tell me the first letter of my pet’s name (they couldn’t) or which type of cookie matches my personality (peanut butter, apparently).

I still think that internet has too much of a presence in our lives, but I’ve also become proof of my own point.

At the time, it seems really important to know this stuff

I find myself checking Facebook as soon as I wake up (isn’t the blue light from the screen supposed to keep you awake?), at intervals throughout the day, and before I go to sleep. When I do exciting things, I instinctively post the obligatory Snapchat story, and then watch snippets of the lives of all my friends who do the same- mostly drunken videos of people’s feet in clubs. Half the time, my phone is on silent because of the constant pinging and buzzing, which means that I miss genuinely important texts and calls, and my voicemail ends up full of messages from my Nana- it would be a lot easier if she could just inbox me on Facebook.

Snapchat is great for celebrating small victories, like a McChicken Sandwich and fries

Today, it’s a full time job just to maintain our own social media: if you switch it off, just for a day, you end up with a backlog of notifications and hours worth of group-chat to scroll back through, which is like reading a play, but made up of your friends’ plans for events, or misadventures of the night before. It’s also taken for granted that everyone will be contactable all the time, which means that we’re pretty much always connected to the internet and can never actually relax. There are few times of the day when our phones aren’t near us – thanks to my alarm, mine is even next to me when I sleep.

But living almost 200 miles away from home, I don’t want to delete my Facebook.

I can’t stay away

It’s the best way to keep in contact with friends and family, as well as being a good way to pass a few minutes whilst waiting for a bus or in a queue. But the amount of time we spend on the internet is actually unbelievable: Ofcom say that 16-24 year olds spend 27 hours per week online – more than one day in every seven.

So as much as I love Best of Tumblr memes and Harry Potter Trivia, and as important as it is to let Buzzfeed tell me which dog breed matches my zodiac sign, I don’t want 2016 to be the year of the phone – as a uni student living away from home for the first time, there are so many more exciting ways to waste my time.