Nielsen stats put the average teen's texting rate at about ten per hour during the day. This, and basic math, leads to some terrifying conclusions!

For example: Nielsen says that this rate of texting results in somewhere over 3000 text per month, per teen, on average. This means that nearly half of every day is texting time for these people, which, assuming they sleep at all, means that they're either texting steadily all day, or a ton during after-school hours. And let's say these texts average out to about 80 characters, which is half the maximum length for a text message: Even if the average word length is very generous five characters (that's six, including a space), these kids are tapping out about 40,000 words of ephemeral nothingness every month, or roughly one Catcher in the Rye's worth of "WILL UR BRTHR BUY US SUM BEER?" and "R U REDDY 2 DO IT YET?" every two months.

What happens when these people get old? Nielsen, for what it's worth, says they'll just keep texting. [Marketing Vox via Textually via Twitter]