Hi, My Name Is Brent...

Over the past ten or more years I have come to the grudging realization that I am an addict*: I am powerless to resist the mesmerizing lure of television. There's nothing that I used to like more than settling down on the couch and watching TV all day on Saturday. Just laying there, drifting from show to show. Even better after we got our Maltivito(TM)** and I could watch six or seven hours of stuff that I actually cared about. But even before then, I'd happily go on a channel-surfing bender with few regrets.

When I started going out with Stella she did this one thing that absolutely amazed me. She'd finish watching a TV show and then turn the TV off. Just like that. Not even interested in what was on next. Even more amazing, she'd get up and go to bed rather than falling asleep on the couch during The Late Show. A stunning display of willpower, apparently, and she made it look so easy.

Of course, at times I'd get the notion in my head that all this time spent staring at the square was a tremendous waste of time, but that was usually during a commercial. Once or twice I even took a week or even longer off, just to prove to myself that I could do it. But it was like holding your breath. You can stop for awhile, but when you're done stopping, you start up again, full blast.

In retrospect, I guess I didn't have much of a chance. The TV was usually on in our house when I was growing up, and watching TV was just the default activity if you weren't doing anything else. Eating dinner? Might as well watch the news. But the problem with that is that when the news is over, you have at best a one-minute window before Becker starts where you can decide to get off your ass and do something else. It's easier to just sit there and watch the next thing.

But it takes so much time. A special one-hour episode of M*A*S*H chews up about 4% of your day, assuming you never sleep. If you do sleep eight hours a day then (a) I'm envious, and (b) that's 6.25% of your day watching M*A*S*H. But if you work for eight hours too, and maybe spend an hour going to/from work, and then spend another couple of hours eating and going to the bathroom and stuff, then you probably have only about five hours of free time a day on days that you work. So that hour of hilarious wartime action is now 20% of your free time.

(Brief aside: How long until we see a half-hour sitcom set during the U.S. Invasion of Iraq? Any bets? I'll say maybe within 10 years.)

Looking at it the other way, if you watch an average of one hour of TV a day -- (and most people watch two***) then you're spending the real-time equivalent of fifteen days a year gazing into the screen. Factor in sleep again, and that's nearly 23 dawn-to-dusk days of watching Friends. (Which might get a little boring, because there are only about 120 hours of Friends episodes, so you'd have to repeat three times.)

That was a number that really got to me. Twenty three weekend-style days per year for just an hour of TV a day? So... then two hours a day is... yikes! That adds up pretty fast. (Did you see how I did that? I took a whole bunch of small numbers and added them together to get a much larger number.) I figured that if I quit watching TV then I would have be able to do so much more other stuff.

But, I've tried quitting in the past, and generally was pretty successful for awhile, but it doesn't last. A couple of years ago I went for a solid month or more without watching any TV at all, but then that ended and it was over. At the time I think that I was hoping that by eliminating TV entirely for awhile that I'd watch less TV when I did start up again, but that isn't what happened.

And, of course television is an integral part of our culture, so you can't give it up completely and expect to remain in touch. I mean, if you don't know your Simpsons references then people look at you like you're a hermit. Some sort of balance seems necessary. I don't want to punish myself by cutting myself off from the legitimate enjoyment of things like South Park and Mr. Show, I just want to drop all the superfluous stuff like the various Law & Order and C.S.I. clones, which I can't remember 15 minutes after I watched it anyway.

So I started to think about my 2+ hour per day habit. If I cut down to, say, an hour a day, then that would give me at least an extra 23+ days worth of awake-time to do other stuff like, for example, finish any of the one-hundred-and-fourteen little projects that I've started or been planning to do. Read some books, learn to play Bridge, write some programs, make some movies, entertain some friends, take some photographs, go skiing, compose some music (Yay GarageBand! Talent schmalent.), or any number of non-passive, creative, social activities that would make me feel better about myself.

(Of course, it's a valid question to consider whether those other activities are really any better than TV. Do I get any more out of spending my time reading sci-fi novels or greek tragedies. The answer may very well be 'no'. Certainly some of the alternative things I could be doing are 'better' than TV in obvious ways: I could volunteer at the hospital or something. But by my thinking, low-value activities are still OK, because I'm not addicted to them. If I was spending all my free time reading comic books, then we'd have the same essential problem in a different wrapper.

Anyway, that's the plan. Limit myself to an hour a day and see how it goes. At this point I'm only ten days into the new program and have watched a total of 6.5 hours of TV, so it's going pretty well.

___

* You have my apologies to if you are reading this and are actually addicted to something serious and find that my claim to addiction trivializes your own considerable substance abuse problem. It is not my intention to diminish anyone's real suffering, especially some whining, politically-correct crackhead like yourself.

** "Maltivito" is our nickname for our RCA Scenium DRS 7000N, which is a DVD Player + PVR. It's a faux Spanish word meaning "little bad TiVo", inspired by the fact that the Scenium is sort of like TiVo, except that it doesn't do as much and it sucks at what it does do.

*** Except Internet users, who watch an average of an hour and forty-five minutes per day.