I know I’ve done that — let’s be honest, we all have.

While my early adventures on social sites were exciting and novel, increasingly, my time spent on these services is starting to feel like a lot of wasted time. Like a virus slowly invading its victim, social media has methodically started to consume every hour of my day. Morning coffees, lunchtime breaks, time before bed, was once cordoned off for books, or even just quiet moments of reflection.

Now, it’s all social media all the time. At the end of the day, what do I have to show for it? Am I more enriched as a human being after a couple of hours spent on Facebook? More fulfilled from Pinterest? A deeper person from Instagram?

Maybe, but probably not.

“If you went through history and took away all the stuff people were doing while they were supposed to be doing something else, you wouldn’t have a lot left,” said John Perry, a philosophy professor at Stanford and author of the book “The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling.” “But time spent poking around in a library in the past led to great ideas. It’s unclear if the same is true for time spent online.”

I’m not blaming the Internet for procrastination. Wasting time is as old as history itself. (An early reference to procrastination was chronicled in a rabbinical book from the year 200, where students were told not to put off their studies.) Yet I am blaming the Internet for sucking people into a cacophony of links, videos and pictures that are constantly being dangled in their faces like some sort of demented digital carrot on a stick. Links that seem like fun at the time, but afterward leave us all feeling a little bit empty inside.

According to Facebook, the company’s 1.23 billion users log into the site for an average of 17 minutes each day. In total, that’s more than 39,757 years of our time collectively spent on Facebook in a single day. And that’s just one website. Numerous reports estimate that 18- to 34-year-olds spend as much as 3.8 hours a day on social media. These days 35- to 49-year-olds don’t fare much better, racking up 3 hours a day on social sites.