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During the course of your life you will, quite literally, spend years sitting in front of a TV. We watch 21 hours of television a week; it is the predominant way that we spend our free time. A whopping 38% of our leisure time is spent in front of the tube. In fact, the three things we do the most, in order, are sleep, work, and watch TV. In an average year you spend 68 days watching TV from the time you get up until you go to bed. If you started on New Years day and did it all in one shot you would not do anything else until the second week of March.1
What do you get in exchange for this massive investment of your time? I would submit to you that TV gives you nothing. It does so in a very literal sense. It offers you a complete lack of mental or physical exertion. TV is entirely passive. Television, even the news, is geared toward an elementary reading level. There is no program on television that can not be understood by a twelve year old. It takes your imagination, critical thought, requirements to assess and process information, even your requirement to move, and replaces them with blinking lights and noises.
Television is not evil, but you can’t say it is altogether positive. Television has been linked to obesity, attention deficit disorders, development problems in children, learning disorders, decreased vocabulary, increased violence, decreased abilities to feel empathy. I am suggesting that we could watch less of it. Less TV in your life is a good thing.
If you agree I have a simple assignment for you. Write down a list of TV shows you watch on a fairly regular basis. Include the news if you are a news watcher. Once you have your list pick a one hour long program that you are going to stop watching. If you only watch the news pick one day a week that you don’t watch it. Trust me you won’t miss anything. It will still be there for you to hear about tomorrow. It goes without saying that you should not simply replace one program for another.
You have just clawed back something very valuable: an hour of your time. Do something with it. Read a book. Work on a project. Watch the sunset. Take a new class. Exercise. Whatever you do with your hour, take note of it. I would love to hear what it was.
Footnotes
- Statistics Canada Figures: www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/famil36a.htm [↩]
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