Sex or Mobile Phones: What's More Important to Us?

To us humans, it appears sex is more important than our mobile phones.

This is good news for the survival and general well being of the human race, but still a key question merits some exploration: “Just how important are mobile phones to us humans?”

Bank of America was curious about this question, so they partnered with a research company and interviewed 1,000 people, asking them basic questions related to mobile phones.

I Want My Phone Back

One question they asked was: If your phone was unexpectedly taken away, what would you be willing to give up to get it back? Nearly 80% of the respondents said they would give up either alcohol (45%) or chocolate (34%) to get it back.

They were more reluctant, however, to give up shopping (22%) or TV/movies (16%), and only 13% said they would give up sex to get their mobile phone back. So, an apparent victory for sex, you might say.

However, the study also found that even fewer people (8%) were willing to give up their car. While we still like sex and are reluctant to stop having it for our phones, sex is apparently less important than our car.

On a practical level, this makes complete sense. It’s unclear, though, whether people are willing to give up having sex in their cars to get their phones back. This question, it appears, was not asked.

Incidentally, the data on chocolate showed that women were much less likely to give up chocolate than men. A mere 27% of women were willing to part with chocolate, but 42% of men were fine with chocolate abstinence. It’s worth noting that no such gender breakdown was provided on the willingness to give up sex.

Your Hygiene or Your Phone?

Clearly phones are important to people. We’d give up guilty pleasures to reclaim them. But how does the phone rank against life’s basics? Is the mobile phone the most important item in our daily lives?

The answer is, in fact, yes. According to the bank’s study, for 18-24 year olds specifically, mobile phones ranked highest among all “life’s basic” options at 96%, edging out staples like the toothbrush (93%) and deodorant (90%). For this age range, mobile phones appear more important than personal hygiene, which could be a good thing to know.

But you can’t say it’s a generational thing. For all study respondents, nearly 50% felt they could not last more than one day without their phone. Of that group 13% said they could not be without their phone for more than one hour. These folks are what the study called “compulsive checkers.”  Another 34%, who the study said felt “naked without their phone,” confessed that they couldn’t go more than 24 hours without it.

Check, Check, and Re-Check…

How often each day do people actually check their phones? The bank’s study didn’t focused on this, but a 2015 Internet Trends report showed that on average people check their phones 150 times a day. (Incidentally, if you’re curious of your phone-checking habit, you can download an app that will track the number of times you check each day. Brilliant, right?)

Think about that for a second. Assume you’re awake 16 of the 24 hours. Checking your phone 150 times a day means doing it over 9 times per hour or roughly every six minutes. This alone speaks to our mobile phone addiction and informs the now popular acronym “FOMO” or “Fear of Missing Out.”

Today we fear that if we don’t check our phone – our pocket-sized gateway to social media, e-mail, news, texts and so much more – we could miss something important.  The fact that our urban dictionary includes a term like “FOMO” is evidence enough of the explosive growth of mobile phones in our world.

How explosive? Consider that mobile traffic in 2014 alone increased 69% over the prior year, according to the Internet Trends Report authored by research guru Mary Meeker.

Consider also the nearly 20-year growth of mobile phones. In 1995, just 80 million people – 1% of our global population – had a mobile phone. In 2014, that number has climbed to 5.2 billion or a whopping 73% of our global population.

I’d say that qualifies as a trend, wouldn’t you?

Numbers Don’t Lie

Mobile phones are big money, too. Facebook, for example, has 1.4 billion users, and of those 1.2 billion people access Facebook via mobile devices on a monthly basis.  An amazing 798 million people access Facebook every day via their mobile phones.

Mobile ads on Facebook account for nearly two-thirds of the company’s revenue. Twitter is even more mobile. Of its 302 million active users, 80% are mobile. In the first quarter 2015, 89% of Twitter’s revenue came from mobile ads.

The money explains why so many companies, like Bank of America for instance, want to understand the mobile habits of us humans. They want to know what we think, what we do and what we value so they can place their investment and advertising bets appropriately.

So, as we’ve established, the good news is that to most of us humans sex still trumps the mobile phone. Remember, though, that 13 percent of the study participants said they’d give up sex to get their phone back. That’s 130 people!

But please be aware that if that a certain special moment arises with that certain special someone in your life (cue the sexy, romantic music) and in that very moment your instinct is to pause first to check your phone, I would suggest that we as a race of people might be in serious trouble.

(Graph credits: Bank of America Study "Bank of America: Trends in Consumer Mobility Report, 2014)