A funny piece with a serious message: don’t use your precious time chasing fads.

But if you wanted to watch every episode of the Guardian’s Top 50 TV series of all time, that would take up another 2,080 of your precious hours. Add in two new series a year – every year – that you simply have to watch, and that’s a further 4,000 hours. Then add in The Great British Bake Off and, in all, that’s around 6,130 hours of television you simply have to see. That’s nearly 7% of your available life

Watching every film on the BFI’s list of The Greatest Films of All Time will take you 217 hours (with an extra half-hour if you want to watch the hilarious “blooper reel” at the end of Citizen Kane). You will also have to watch at least one new film a month that Charlotte at work keeps banging on about, and one foreign-language film a month because Peter Bradshaw has called it “a stunning new benchmark for Latvian cinema”. That takes your total for films you simply have to see up to 2,233 hours.

If there’s a fad you’re truly interested in, go ahead – but don’t let people suck you into stuff that’s of marginal interest.

The first comment thread, which applies the advice to dogs, is hilarious. It starts out, “The dogs just read this. He wants me take him out for a walk more he’s got less hours than I have to do everything before he dies.” And carries on from there.