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10 Things You Can Do Instead Of Checking Facebook. Again.

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Fifty minutes a day disappears into the scroll, and TheThings wants it back.

TheThings dropped “10 Things You Can Do Instead Of Checking Facebook. Again.” as part of its late-2016 push into digital lifestyle content, and the pitch is blunt: the average internet user burns up to 50 minutes daily scrolling photo feeds, reading status updates and checking on people they barely talk to. Facebook had crossed one billion active monthly users by this point, cementing itself as the default place people share the highs and lows of their lives. The video argues that habit comes at a cost — to focus, to real-world connection, and to the hours in your day you can’t get back.

• The average internet user spends up to 50 minutes per day browsing Facebook, according to the figures cited in the piece.
• Facebook had surpassed one billion active monthly users, making it the default hub for personal sharing that the video says people rely on too heavily.
• The list runs ten alternatives, from exercise and reading to calling a friend, cooking, writing, learning a new language, decluttering and volunteering.

The Case Against the Scroll

The video’s framing isn’t anti-Facebook so much as anti-autopilot. Checking the app has become so automatic that people do it without deciding to, and that’s the habit TheThings is targeting. Fifty minutes a day adds up to nearly six hours a week spent stalking crushes, monitoring acquaintances and refreshing a feed that rarely changes anything about your actual life. The piece doesn’t ask viewers to delete their accounts — it asks them to notice the reflex and replace it with something that leaves them better off than they started.

Too much Facebook can actually be a bad thing — that’s why we developed this list of things you can do instead.

The Ten Alternatives

TheThings’ list leans practical over preachy. It opens with exercise — even a short walk — for the mood and energy boost, then moves to reading a book as a low-cost escape hatch from the feed. Calling a friend instead of texting or liking a photo gets its own slot, as does cooking or baking, which the video frames as a small, tangible reward for time spent away from a screen.

The back half of the list gets more ambitious: journaling or creative writing as a therapeutic outlet, picking up a new hobby, meditating for a few minutes to reset focus, and enrolling in an online language course. It closes with decluttering your living space and volunteering with a local organization — two suggestions that swap passive scrolling for something with a visible, finished result.

Late 2016 Cultural Resonance

The timing matters. By December 2016, smartphones had made checking Facebook a reflex rather than a choice, and digital detox content was becoming its own lifestyle category — the same wave that would later fuel screen-time debates across every platform, not just Facebook. TheThings built its audience on exactly this kind of relatable, low-lift self-improvement content, sitting alongside its other social-media-adjacent coverage of how public behavior online can backfire, the same territory explored in pieces like Reporters Who Ruined Their Careers On Social Media and Actors Who Ruined Their Careers On Social Media, both of which mine the flip side of the same problem: too much time spent performing for an app.

None of the ten items on TheThings’ list require an app, a subscription or a New Year’s resolution — just fifty fewer minutes of scrolling and one phone call, one walk, or one closed laptop instead.