To break up all the dark and gloomy posts as of late, here’s a more lighthearted post. I’ll talk today about how I stopped watching TV many years ago and what I’ve done since then. Here we go.
As astonishing as it might sound, giving up TV was totally unintentional on my part. It happened about thirteen years ago, give or take a year. The church I attended at the time had its annual twenty-one days of prayer and fasting event. In addition to making dietary changes, members were encouraged to give up something else during that time. I chose to stop watching modern sitcoms. Any show that had cursing, crude jokes, and other similar elements was off of my list for those three weeks. In their place, I watched older sitcoms I’d enjoyed from the time I was a kid. For a while, at least. At some point during that fast, I eventually stopped watching TV altogether. Even after that time period ended, I never got back into it regularly. It was as if I lost my taste for it and never regained it. That surprised me as I had watched tons of TV for all of my life up until that point. I could never imagine giving it up, and yet that’s exactly what I did of my own free will.
I’ll clarify that when I say watching TV, I’m talking about sitting down in front of the TV for hours at a time and watching whatever I like that happens to be on at the moment. Within a few years of stopping that habit, I would occasionally watch a show on a streaming service or one I had recorded, and I still occasionally watch such shows in similar ways nowadays. For example, I’ve watched The Muppet Show, The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross, and the first season of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood online within the last few years. I’ve also watched several shows on Netflix since I gave up regular TV. Despite doing that, I still haven’t gone back to casually watching one or more shows on TV like I did for the first twenty or so years of my life.
Unfortunately, although I moved away from TV, I more than replaced it with the internet and especially social media. Those are even more addictive for me than TV ever was, and I don’t see myself quitting or hugely scaling back on them at any point. That said, until I stopped watching TV, I could never imagine giving that up, so who knows what the future will hold for me with the internet? If there’s anything good about my internet addiction, it’s that I can do far more with the internet than I can with TV. Whether that’s looking up information, doing deep dives on subjects that interest me, learning new skills, and especially creating content (such as this blog), the fact that I can affect it is a huge point in its favor over TV, which only affects me without letting me affect it.
At this point, I can’t imagine ever giving up internet to the same degree that I’ve given up TV. Aside from the things in the previous paragraph, a big part of my appreciation for the internet is all the wonderful resources for grief I’ve found through the it. Book recommendations, special TV shows and videos, articles, and above all else the songs that have helped me welcome grief, sorrow, depression, and pain. All of those have been so incredibly beneficial in my grief journey after losing my dog Sawyer. I can’t imagine how I’d have gotten through Sawyer’s death without those resources, and, unfortunately, I know that many more of my loved ones will also die before I leave this Earth, so I’ll be returning to them as needed. That said, I would like to cut down the amount of time I spend mindlessly surfing the internet or consuming endless amounts of content. That would give me more time for other activities I enjoy and which are better for me than being online nearly every waking moment of my day.
Ultimately, I believe it was good that I stopped watching TV as much as I did. I’m glad to have found freedom from it, especially since it happened so easily. I’m also glad to have found a space for it in my life on occasion without it taking over as much of my days as it did for nearly two decades. I’ll point out now that I see nothing wrong with TV in principle, and I don’t look down on those who watch it. It would be hypocritical of me if I did since, as mentioned above, I do still watch it on occasion. The fact that it’s now my servant rather than my master is a wonderful change, and I hope that I can apply that to more things in my life as time goes by.