If you are like I once was, the thought has occasionally crossed your mind: “maybe I watch too much t.v.?” You look at all the things you once dreamed of accomplishing, learning to play guitar, mastering the fine art of cooking, writing a novel, getting inshape, keeping in touch with friends and family. Each New Year’s Day you say to yourself, “alright, this year is the year I’m going to reach my goals” yet when December comes you find yourself in the same situation as the year before, except you are a year older and more removed from those dreams you once had.

I am not here to criticize you for watching television, but I would like to share with you my story about giving it up.

When the husband and I met I was a closeted television watcher. I had a 12” television with a wire hanger attached to the back from which I could watch PBS and the major networks. Brandon, however, had cable, a luxury I had not had the resources to enjoy since moving to Chicago.

At first I was mostly impervious to the allure of cable, however, as our first long Chicago winter together progressed our television viewing hours increased exponentially. At the end of that winter, we looked back and wondered what the hell had happened. Somehow, our social calendar had been reduced yet neither of us had produced any creative work.

When we moved in together in April of 2006, we made the decision to give up television. We knew it would be a hefty sacrifice, for we had grown accustomed to our daily doses of VH1, The Daily Show, and Stephen Colbert, as well as our weekly forays with Battlestar Galactica, South Park, and others seemingly important shows that I have since forgotten.

In the spirit of honesty, l admit that the first few months were a challenge. Instead of a rapid outpouring of creativity, we found ourselves bored at night, constantly feuding, and moving through our Netflix queue with a tenacious rapidity. However, over the course of several months our longing for television began to wane, and as it did we slowly began to fill our lives with the pursuit of those dreams that we longed for but that evaded us in our first year together.

My website, DJing, a renewed interest in reading, and creative writing have all been outcomes of giving up television, and I find myself enriched by these activities in a way today that I could never have foreseen when we began this modest experiment. I am often asked “So what do you do at night” when friends realize that no, we actually do not watch television. I’ve decided that the best response to this question is simply “We make dinner, we eat together, we separate and have creative time, and then we fuck. What do you do?”

I am not here to espouse moral superiority as though I have reached an enlightenment unattainable to those of you who watch television, but I am here to say that since giving up television my mind has reached a level of intellectual nuance and creativity that I could not access otherwise. The result of this clarity is most obvious to us on the rare occasions that we stumble out to see the latest blockbuster on the big screen. In the long wait leading up to the actual start of the picture, Brandon and I find ourselves watching the commercials and trailers leading up to the feature presentation with voyeuristic curiosity and detachment.

Popular culture, particularly the culture of television consumption, perpetuates itself through a systematic language of sign and signifier that is deeply ingrained through marketing, repetition, and habit. We like to speak of it this way: “In a commercial we saw before Beowulf, there was a series of signals, cute kid/ clumsy dufus guy/ accident/ explosion/ product placement.” All around us people laughed and cheered, but Brandon and I could not relate to the commercial. We are effectively so far removed from the broadcast paradigm that the symbols no longer work on us. Like bookworms and recluses everywhere, we need a connection between the signifier and signified. Marketing, particularly in the form of television commercials, has so desensitized the viewing public to these connections, through constant repetition, that the rest of the story is no longer necessary in order to sale a product. The general viewing public needs only the symbols, the punch lines, whereas we need a marketer to draw logical, thoughtful connections before hear the persuasion. In essence, by giving up television, the husband and I have become bad consumers. The easy jargon of the marketer fails on us because we do not make such simple connections. Our minds are focused on our lives, and we do not “turn off” several hours each night for a marketer to sale us the latest “must have” product.

We are by no means perfect in our withdrawal, and we own well worn copies of “Arrested Development” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” on DVD. However, the experience of watching these shows on DVD is far different than watching them on network T.V. Stripped of commercials, these shows, and others of equal standing, speak only of the art and craftsmanship that their writers intended. Our enjoyment of television as a medium, through DVD, is focused only on the show itself and not on the marketing sound bites that bookmark a show on network T.V. As a result, we are also far more discerning in our tastes.

Capitalism at its worst creates wants in order to sale us things we “need” in order to fulfill those wants. At its best, the inverse is true of capitalism. This is a pattern that is difficult to see, and only when an individual sufficiently removes herself from the medium do these connections become clear.

So, if your life feels muted, if you reach the end of your day and wonder what happened to all those hours since you woke up in the morning, if year after year passes and you continually find yourself farther removed from your most fundamental and idealistic goals, then perhaps the time has come for you, too, to question your addiction to media.

I never believed, when we began this little experiment, that I would come down so harshly on television as a medium. Yet, two years into the experiment, I find that my thoughts have grown broader, my awareness more acute, and my life so abundant in simple, creative, enriching endeavors, that I can never go back to mindlessly sitting through 3-4 hours of television per night. According to a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation: “American children and adolescents spend 22 to 28 hours per week viewing television, more than any other activity except sleeping. By the age of 70 they will have spent 7 to 10 years of their lives watching TV.” Seven to ten years of your life seems like a vulgar amount of time to spend engaged in such a passive endeavor as watching T.V. Life is simply too short for that. So, if you feel that your life has become muted in ways you can’t explain, perhaps the time has come for you too to consider turning off your T.V. Give it some time, you will be surprised by the outcome.

Image by Roo Reynolds courtesy of a CC License.