I grew up with television. It was my dear friend. It taught me English (through Cartoon Network) and it comforted me in times of stress.
Most people grow up with television. And the news. It’s easy to use it as an escape from the world, and from your feelings.
It can feel good to switch on and switch off, but is it what you want to be doing for the rest of your life?
TV can be useful, but it has the tendency to take over your life and push you into a pool of procrastination.
Nothing moves. Nothing gets done. Your dreams fade away.
Of course, the same can be said about sitting in front of your computer.
I do think that computer clicking is a bit more active, but if you’re watching cats on YouTube, you might want to reconsider your approach.
With all that said, enjoy!
1. Time
How many hours a day do you spend watching the TV? If you spend just 2 hours a day watching TV, that amounts to 730 hours per year, which is around 30 days. In other words, you’re spending 1 month per year watching TV. Imagine what you could do with that time if TV didn’t exist in your life.
You may already be living a TV-free lifestyle. In that case, use this article as confirmation that you’re heading in the right direction.
2. Discipline
Let’s face it, most of us can’t help ourselves if we have the TV right in front of us. It’s almost like having a twitter tab in your browser up while you’re “supposed” to be doing something productive.
You can’t help but click that tab and see if something new is going on. The simple solution is to eliminate TV from your life entirely. The more accessible you make TV, the more you’ll watch it, because it’s so easy to turn on.
If you don’t want to throw out your TV, you can always cancel all the cable or whatever you have giving you your entertainment. That’s what I did when I had a TV. I sold mine a month before I moved to Spain.
Getting rid of your TV gives you momentum to build your discipline, so take advantage of it!
3. Relationships
Everyone has a compulsion to interact and be social. After all, we’re social people that need interaction. When you kill your TV, you may notice an empty feeling. It’s almost as if something is missing from your life.
For me this feeling happens when I am without internet, especially if I have no friends or family around. It makes me want to call someone and hang out.
4. Energy
When I stopped watching TV, I suddenly noticed more energy. I have no idea how this happened. If TV was a life-form, it would be a vampire. It makes you feel good while sucking you dry.
Try eliminating TV from your life even for a few weeks and write down the improvements in your life. I think you’ll be surprised at what you find. Once you’ve made the jump, you most likely will never want to go back to being a TV-slave again.
5. Focus
Many people that I’ve talked to say that they’ve experienced heightened clarity when they eliminated TV from their life. When I stopped watching, clarity wasn’t something I was tuned into, so I can’t say that I noticed anything.
Although in hindsight it does feel like something happened. My mind became sharper, clearer and more powerful. There are a lot of things going on when watching TV that we don’t know about. I’m not even going to start speculating what they are, but one thing is for sure—they do affect our minds.
6. Creativity
When you watch TV, you’re in receive-mode, but when you stop and reduce TV, news and unnecessary entertainment in general, you go into creation mode. Just look at what your mind does when you’re lying in a field on a hot, summer day—it starts to day dream and imagine.
If nothing else, I’ve found that I have a lot more time to indulge in other more meaningful things. Inspiration strikes me often when I’m doing something that occupies my mind, but still keeps the channels open, so to speak. A few good examples are walking, meditating and washing the dishes. No dishwasher needed! 😉
7. Uniqueness
Whether you like it or not, you are affected by what you watch. You start to second guess yourself on what you wear. What will people think of you if you deviate from the norm?
By decreasing outside pressure and programming, you’ll start to see your own uniqueness. Everyone talks about being remarkable. Being remarkable to me means being your true, authentic self.
8. Reality
Your map of reality gets distorted by TV. Your brain cannot differentiate between what’s real and what’s imagined. When I stopped watching, I felt freer to express myself. I was no longer bombarded with the standards TV forced on me.
The less input you have to base your beliefs on, the more you’ll create them from your own experiences and feelings. It also gives you the possibility to listen for guidance from other mystical places ;).
9. Advanced Civilizations
Let’s try an exercise in creative imagination, if you will. Imagine if we had the technology to fly to other civilizations on other planets. What if we landed and saw all of them staring at a screen? What would your first reaction be? You’d probably think that they weren’t the brighest race in the universe, at least I would.
Now imagine an advanced civilization. What do you think they would be doing? Do you think they would spend a large chunk of their time watching unnecessary entertainment on an electronic screen? Or do you think they would be doing what they love while benefiting their whole race? Who knows.
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I’m kind of passionate about a TV free life. The main reason is to get rid of all that negativity I used to subject myself to when I watched TV in pretty much waking hour.
I do have a TV but it only gets used to watch films and sport matches from time to time. Most of the time it is switched off.
It came home to me yesterday when we had a house guest. 10 minutes after arriving she’d turned on the TV and sat for something like 3 hours glued to South American soap after soap. We went to the kitchen to eat and I turned the TV off while there was nobody in the room. She just couldn’t understand why anyone would do that. TV’s are supposed to be ‘on’ not ‘off’.
Yeah it’s funny how big of a part TV plays in most people’s lives. I was once visiting a friend. They had 3 TVs in separate rooms and they were all on. Crazy.
Hi Henri,
I am not a fan of TV too. I keep a low information diet as taught by Tim Ferris and I do find that the media is not putting too much positive energy into TV programs.
Cheers,
Vincent
Although there are a few series that are excellent, but those can be gotten from other sources than TV anyway.
Henri: While I agree with your points, I do love certain TV shows and derive pleasure from them. But, in my new apartment I don’t have cable and have found that to be a blessing in disguise as I work on freelance projects and move towards the launch of a very big new project that I’ll likely be announcing by the end of this week. Lack of tv has given me a great amount of focus. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this.
No harm in enjoying yourself once in a while! I usually wait until TV shows come out on DVD and watch them, if I really want to. This is a pretty effective procrastination strategy for me, because whenever an apparently good show is on I go “I’m going to wait until it’s done” and when it’s done I usually don’t want to watch it anyway.
But as you said, the lack of TV really gives you a lot of free time to work with, finishing projects and getting stuff done!
Hey Henri,
Fellow non-TV-watcher here *raises hand*
Agree with all your points, especially the time one. The thing with TV is you don’t usually watch just one show – you channel surf, let a channel run, etc. Add in all the commercials, and that’s a lot of time spent in front of the boob tube a day.
I went to a high school that was a college prep school, so I left my parents’ home from an early age of 16, right in the middle of my addiction. But because there was so many awesome people to hang out and play with around me (the other point you made about being social), not to mention all the activities the school offered, it was surprisingly easy to ditch TV. Within a few weeks, I didn’t miss TV at all.
Since that point, I haven’t watched TV regularly. Maybe here or there very rarely. But I don’t own a TV, and I never feel compelled to tune into a show or whatever.
Also, I think digital and online video removed the TV’s stranglehold on many of us. We have the freedom to watch ONLY what we want, when we want. A 20-minute episode of something here, a movie there. But no channel surfing, no commercials, no huge time being wasted. We’re conscious and in control of what we watch.
TV is dead, long live TV 😉
Oleg
In my last apartment while back in Scandinavia I had a TV but no channels, because I was too lazy to get them. Now I don’t even have one, so that makes it even easier, although it could come in handy when learning Spanish.
Limiting tv accesses is a great way to take your time and life back. I have found a blance between my need for entertainment and my striving for a better life by cutting the cable. What i do now is use streeming media to watch the shows that i realy want to see or by them on dvd. What i have noticed is that I do not wach as much tv since i do not have the ablity to flip chanels. when a show ends my tv watching ends and i go do something else. the other advantage of streaming media is that it limits my comerrcial intake, in some cases eliminating them all together.
Yup, it’s so easy to channel surf and just sit there watching programs all day.
My husband and I got rid of our tv about 5 years ago. I had to talk him into it, because he was a news-nut. He watched the news constantly. But he love not having it now. He can still get his fix from his laptop, but it won’t capiivate him as long as t.v. did.
I love that our 8 year old son doesn’t watch cartoons. They are very violent!
We do rent videos from Netflix – but we find that we hardly watch them. They sit for weeks sometimes.
I also love that we are not influenced by all the negative messages that come from t.v. Our minds feel cleaner!
Last night, as a family we played a board game called Carcasson. Sometimes we play Monopoly or something else. Usually, we’re reading, or at the beach, or cooking a fabulous meal.
Life is better without the temptation of T.V. Also, we save about $1,000 a year on a cable bill!
Yeah I’ve always wondered what was up with cartoons, they’re crazy weird. The person that makes those cartoons has to have a slight mental problem.
A lot of opportunities suddenly open up when you get rid of the TV. Time you would’ve spent staring at the tube is now spent somewhere else!
I do watch TV. But it’s a Tivo style box that records programs so I can watch them when I have time. My girlfriend loves to watch shows and snuggle up together so it makes her happy and I’m happy to please her. Plus Jack Bauer is a legend!
Don’t get me wrong though – it’s only after I’ve worked out, been for a walk, meditated, completed my priority tasks and done what I have to do that I’ll sit back and enjoy some TV.
I keep hearing about Jack Bauer, but I’m still not convinced. Maybe one day 😉
Henri,
I watch very little tv (well…I do watch Jack Bauer, though…). Really, not much more than that. And what I have found is that there is so much other stuff that I can use my time for…in actively leading the life I want. So, I am with you on this 100%!
I haven’t watched TV for… years and years. Not to say I haven’t found wonderful ways of wasting my time though. But TV is just totally useless. I can’t find any excuse for it. Every half hour you spend on TV is a half hour of living death.
Andrew
I agree with you 100 percent Henri. A recent study measured men who watched television and were addicted to porn.
It didn’t measure normal television watching or even your average male who might watch a porno occasionally.
What neurologists found by testing the brains of these people was amazing. Way they found was porn creates a dopamine release much like eating chocolate does.
It seems, much like a drug addiction, they literally had rewired their brains to think a certain way and the material watched needed to be more and more graphic, to create a sexual response, as time passed.
If people think this is impossible, think again. There are quite a few people (myself included) who are highly susceptible to the things they hear or see.
I haven’t owned a television set, in over two years now, and I’m actually happy to be oblivious about all the negativity going on in the world.
If a person wants to change the world, they must first change the person in the mirror and take back control and eliminate all those things which attempt to control how a person perceives things.
Henri,
I used to watch TV quite often. Not any more. I believe you can learn more and accomplish more and truly discover who you are just fine by not watching that darn thing.
I love watching movies, oh my god do I, but not TV.
What movies do you mostly watch?
Hi Henri,
I am new to your website/blog but am so glad I signed up!!! Very interesting stuff…
I found both the news and the tv posts to be particularly fascinating; as I’m a bit of an NPR junkie AND my husband just talked to me last night about getting a larger tv…!!! (It would be free from his work) So I’ll have to be sure to show him your e-mails. Thanks for the provacative ideas…
Sincerely,
Ann
I think the only reason for watching TV is to make money out of it, by writing reviews or commentaries.
Hey Henri,
I agree with you on what TV does to society. We procrastinate and are less productive a with the TV around.
I personally rarely watch any TV at all. I think I went for a total of 6 months before watching any TV before… Movies on the other hand I love to watch.
Lots of great points!
– Yo
Henri,
Some time ago, I was gifted with a brand new, expensive, color TV.
Politely, I had to refuse the offer, because I really don’t want to watch TV: it is passive entertainment and kills the reading habit. I would rather read a book, thank you.
Also, 99% of what’s on TV is junk anyway. No wonder it is called “the idiot box.”
There are more constructive things you can do with your life than watching TV. I am so happy I don’t own a TV. In the past, I used to watch a lot of TV and pretty soon I felt like I had turned into a moron: my IQ went down the drain and I had to flush it.
It is better to develop “objective interests” in life and go for it. Having said that, not all the TV shows are bad. I like some of the olden goldies (classics) and some of the latest movies are worth watching when you have some free time. However, I am really picky and choosy about what I watch. Thanks for the timely reminder.
When i was kid, i spent much time by watching tv. Now i realized that tv will ‘kill” creativity and make me more individuals and not “socialized:. “Junk” everywhere and not produce something. With internet, now i can socialized by social website like facebook, or twitter. And also earn dollars here…
Great post Henri and an important topic more people should ponder. I’m married to a self-proclaimed TV junkie and she doesn’t think anything is wrong with it. She can literally sit and watch TV for 8-10+ hours per day if we don’t have plans to do something else. If I try to go in the other room or my office and do something besides watch TV, she gets mad because I’m not sitting there staring at the idiot box with her. Chicks! 😉
About 4 or 5 months ago, I actually convinced her to let me cancel cable after showing her all the stuff she could stream for free over the Internet or via Netflix. She agreed and I marched down to my local cable provider with cable/DVR box in hand. They cancelled everything except my Internet service and told me someone would be out to install a filter on my line to block all the clear QAM channels. Long story short… Nobody ever came out to install the filter and I’m getting all the same channels I had before — for free! So, it didn’t help to eliminate TV from our lives, but it did help save a bunch of money. I have to take the good with the bad..
I hooked up a Windows 7 PC with TV-tuner card to the flat screen, and we use that as a DVR when needed (also free).
Anyway, I’m still working toward that TV-free life, and I hope my wife will eventually give in. Getting TV out of my life isn’t really worth getting a divorce over, and right now I’m afraid that is what it would take! 🙂
Keep up the great work here on your blog!