Kill Your TV
We are kicking the TV out of our house. It’s not that it’s done something wrong — instead, it’s simply time to give it to someone who can take better care of it. We’ve been neglecting the poor thing for too long and it deserves better.
Neither my wife nor I watch much TV although we have been briefly addicted to various shows. I have a current addiction to Battlestar Galactica and my wife was recently watching Desperate Housewives. What we find, though, is that once we miss a few shows (easy when kids are in the mix), we don’t miss them. TV is probably one of the easiest addictions to kick – just turn the thing off.
It will be nice to rid the living room of the box. Have you noticed just how the TV or “home entertainment system” dominates the room? If you have enough space for a dedicated entertainment room, perhaps that’s fine for you. We just have one room big enough for guests and a 27″ TV. We’d like to shift the focus back to people.
We are not banning all video entertainment from our home. We just signed up with Zip.ca (Netflix for Canadians) and will watch the movies on our computers. The subscription offsets the cancelled cable charge, so in the end we are entertainment neutral, I guess.
If you got rid of your TV would you miss it? For how long?
January 2nd, 2008 at 7:29 pm
When we got back from Israel, we realized it was 3 weeks before we turned the tv on at all. We do download shows and watch them on the computer, but we watch on our schedule. And we watch only those shows we want to watch – we don’t get sucked into the channel surfing void. We still have our tv, but the poor thing is taking longer and longer to “warm up” from lack of use.
Good for you guys! I can’t wait til we actually get rid of the tv and the giant armoire that encases it. Space reclaimed!
October 19th, 2009 at 3:56 am
Wow – I came across your blog from problogger-inspired post “Lessons from an Ice Cream Truck”. Good one, by the way.
But this post “Kill your TV” made me comment.
The same happened for us …now 9 years ago! When “Survivor” first came on, my wife and I commented how much time we’re wasting on such lame TV programming. Now, nearly a decade later – we haven’t even owned a TV for 8 years.
Warning from the wise: be prepared that, after some time, you’ll feel social pain at the water cooler. Sure you’ll have more free time and WILL accomplish more meaningful goals, but when friends are bonding over last week’s debute medical/cop/reality/all-the-above show, you may feel out of touch. Killing TV is worth it, but don’t brag about “how worth it” it is. Killing the TV is not for everyone.
Since we permanently turned off TV, we managed to add so much more to our lives.
Now, enjoying expat life in Prague, Czech Republic
-Jeff