Why I Gave Up TV

I used to watch a lot of TV. When I would get home from school, and later work, I would spend hours and hours watching the absolute worst shows. At the time I thought I was being entertained, and even informed when I watched 'news' programs. But a few years ago I made a conscious choice to stop watching TV, and it's honestly been one of the best things I've done.

1. Channel Surfing Is Mindless

I do almost everything on purpose. I choose to learn about things like computer programming, choose to work at startups, choose to live in New York City, choose to travel in my free time, and so on. TV used to be the one glaring area where I just laid down and let what was being broadcast, no matter how awful, determine what I would do with a huge chunk of my time. These days when I feel like consuming visual media I download a movie or a show and watch it deliberately. As a result I have more time on my hands, which I have used to do more thinking, reading, and creating.

2. On Demand Consumption Is Superior

While there are a few shows that I enjoy that are episodic, almost everything I watch is serial. Watching serial shows on TV is very frustrating. You have to deal with making sure to either watch the show live or record it, sit through lots of commercials, wait an entire week to resolve the episode's cliff hanger, and keep all the shows intricacies in your head for a few months over the course of an entire season. By the time I get around to deliberately watching a TV show, the season is already over, and all the commercial free episodes are available to download on demand. I can choose to binge watch an entire season all at once over a weekend on my own time. It's a luxurious and superior experience, and well worth the wait over watching each episode live.

3. Commercials Are Corrosive

A colleague at work gave a partial rendition of a corporate jingle, "da da da da no rules just right", and asked everyone which company it was because she had forgot. I, sadly, knew the answer - it was Outback Steakhouse of course. I knew this because I've watched probably hundreds of hours of commercials over the course of my life. Advertising like this has without a doubt shaped my preferences, manufactured desires for unnecessary products, and polluted my brain with a large amount of useless information like corporate logos and jingles. Not watching TV has drastically decreased my exposure to this toxic brew of advertising.

4. TV News is Uninformative

As I got older, and more curious about the world around me, I started watching more and more 'news'. I say 'news' in quotes because what passes for news on television is really political entertainment about current events. Pundits with large egos and a shallow understanding of the issues give short talking points, debate ensues, the rage factor is dialed up, and then it all happens again the next night. Although I became informed about a lot of small facts about current events, I never developed any sort of understanding of the world, and the larger context surrounding things. Furthermore, the sort of news that is covered on a daily basis on television is either sanitized, corporate, and pro-status-quo (i.e. PBS Evening News, etc), nihilistically spewing misinformation (i.e. Fox News), or just plain partisan (i.e. MSNBC). Moving away from getting the news from TV to getting the news from the internet has made me substantially more informed, and also much less outraged.