What did people do after work and before Sleep prior to the advent of Television? What was life like for those poor technologically deprived souls? Were they perpetually mired in agonizing boredom? How did they entertain themselves while trapped in that terrible 5 to 7 hour window of daily life? Have you ever contemplated any of these questions and what their answers might be? I’m going to speculate that you haven’t, not even for a moment. Television programming is better than it ever has been. If you don’t want commercials surreptitiously invading your viewing experience you can now fork over some extra cash and the T.V. advertisement snakes will be driven out of your life for good. Let’s also not forget that the quantity and quality of the content sites like Netflix are producing is commendably robust. So why in the world would anyone ponder for even a moment what their life would be like sans Television? I confidently make the assumption that the overwhelming majority of people have never wonder what their life would be like without Television based on my firsthand experience or having my sanity questioned every time I informed someone that I had gotten rid of my television. Over the last year everyone I knew and everyone I met learned of my television-less life experiment. To my surprise this pool of hundreds of people essentially all shared the same opinion of the experiment. Obviously only a crazy person would stop watching T.V. in this day and age.
The idea to evict television from my life was born of a sequence of thoughts I had been pondering for many years prior to getting rid of my TV. The day before I made the decision to toss out the TV, I was enduring an acute case of self-inflicted illness brought on by the activities of the previous night. The hangover was fierce and from the moment I woke, I had decided that I would not engage in productive activity for a full 24 hours. My gut was as pickled as my head was throbbing, and I would seek refuge on the couch, buried under blankets, eating junk food, while I binge watched Netflix shows. I recalled from a few weeks earlier someone mentioning that Black Mirror was a good show Netflix had recently acquired. I pulled it up and sure enough it is an excellent program. In line with my goals for the day I watched Black Mirror from approximately 2pm until it was time to go to bed 8 or 9 hours later. If you haven’t binge watched Black Mirror for an entire day I don’t recommend that you do. It will likely spoil your opinion of technological advancement, render your opinion of the future bleak, and perhaps inspire you to rethink how you’ve been living your life. Actually….Maybe I do recommend binge watching Black Mirror, but only if you’re already interested in making changes towards a more natural way of living and haven’t yet been able to summon the will to actually make those changes.
I ended January 1st of 2018 feeling disturbed by the content of that show. The reason Black Mirror is so good is that one can absolutely see how the current state of society coupled with the way in which our technology appears to be advancing could wind up replicating the dystopian horrors portrayed by the series. Black mirror may even make you start to wonder if we aren’t already living in subtly different versions of some of the scenarios the show has concocted. All I know for sure is that on January 2nd of 2018 I had decided that my mobile phone needed to revert back into a tool rather than an entertainment device, and that I needed to take a break from television. I talked with my wife and informed her of my desire to remove the television from our home. She agreed to do it and remains to this day the only human I’ve encountered that thinks living without television is a worth-while idea.
I’ve lived a little over three decades now and the thing that disturbs me the most as I’ve aged is the perception we all seem to share that time accelerates the older we become. Around a person’s mid-twenties they start developing a sense of amazement on New Year’s Eve to the fact that an entire year has passed by so quickly. Where did all that time go? And how is this possible? By the time you’re in your thirties you start to realize that you’re going to die a lot sooner than you thought you would, and you’re not just amazed anymore, you’re fully mystified by the blistering pace the Earth carries as it circumnavigates the sun.
So I began to wonder, as I often do, “Are there ways to perceptually slow this ride down?” and also “What are the mechanisms that cause time to speed up for the older viewer in the first place?” I developed a host of theories that were fun to think about, but nothing that would produce any action items or steps that I could take to try to halt my perceived sense of time accelerating over time. That Is until I noticed and internalized how quickly a day seemed to expire when you spend all of it passively binging television shows. This in turn made me wonder, as I often do, “If we spend most of our time between 5pm and sleeping watching T.V. are we inadvertently accelerating time by overconsuming this one passive activity?” A quickly searched online Nielson report asserts that the average American watches 5 hours and 4 minutes of television per day, which is nearly all of the waking time we have at the end of our work day. Those 5 hours per day equate to 77 days per year in total, or if you like percentages better, approximately 21% of the calendar year spent passively and mindlessly absorbing screen based entertainment. If you’re lucky enough to live for 80 years, and you consume television at the average American pace, you’ll have spent approximately 17 full years watching T.V……..And you think my wife and I are the crazy ones?
I have no doubt that perceived time moves at its speediest pace when we are passively entertained. It also moves quickly when we are actively entertained, but at the end of a session of active entertainment you typically come away with a distinct memory. Creating distinct memories is an effective means of chunking your life. The more chunks you create in a given year the longer that year will seem, and to be clear, it’s impossible to create chunks by watching television day after day. Like poop on the walls of an insane asylum, watching copious amounts of television is the best method a person can employ to effectively smear there life into one shitty meaningless blur.
Now, let’s go back to January 2nd 2018 for a quick recap. I’m a fairly average American and I’m convinced that I’m unintentionally accelerating time watching 5 hours of TV per day. I ask my wife “Are you ok giving up T.V. for a while?” She says “absolutely”. So we move the TV from the living room into garage storage. The first two or three days are great. The house is clean, chores are done, books are getting read, and I feel invigorated by the sharp change in my life. Then on day 4 withdrawal sets in; I don’t want to do chores and read every night; none the less we power through the urge to rescue the television from the garage and 3 to 4 short weeks later notice that the withdrawal symptoms have subsided and we no longer crave TV time. I start exercising more often, my wife and I prepare meals together more often, we talk to each other in the evenings more often, I start reading every night, and I go to bed at a decent hour. I get healthier.
It’s hard to make an objective claim that I’ve actually slowed my own perceived sense of the speed at which time passes, because there’s no method I’m aware of for objectively measuring how a person perceives an event. I know that I stopped watching T.V. over a year ago, and today it feels like I made that choice a decade ago. Additionally but also subjectively, I feel like 2018 has been a longer year relative to 2017 or 16. It’s definitely been chunkier anyway….I got a lot done and made a lot of changes, actions I likely wouldn’t have taken if TV had been in the mix. I know factually that my wife and I are happier and more engaged with one another than we have been in recent years. Our relationship feels thicker than it ever has, and I have no doubt that this is due to the increased time we spend constructively interacting with one another after work. We tell everyone we meet at some point or another that we’ve exiled TV from our lives and the spectrum of reactions we receive from recipients of this news ranges from “Oh, I could never do that” to “You guys are crazy.” I’m not so sure we’re the crazy ones. The fact that almost everyone in this country willfully flushes 21% of their lives down the drain is the behavior that is in fact crazy.
You hear people say things today like: “I don’t have time to go to the gym” or “I don’t have time to cook”. Really what I believe is happening is a loss of prioritization. What we need to be telling ourselves is “I don’t have time to watch TV” because I have to exercise and cook. 32% of American men and 35% of American women are obese. I recently heard anecdotal evidence that the primary staples of most Americans diets are pizza and fried chicken, and I’m inclined to believe this anecdotal evidence based on the fact that 1 in every 3 people are obese. Mixing a diet of pizza and fried chicken, with 5 hours of daily television, a high probability of 8 hours spent sitting for a desk job, and it’s actually amazing that only 1 in 3 people are obese, in my mind that number should be higher.
To close and link this article with the primary mission of the Project Trophy Husband website (becoming a better man); I have to vociferously proclaim that it’s impossible to be an actual man if you’re watching television all the fucking time. Real actual men don’t spend 35 hours a week sitting around doing nothing. They spend 35 hours a week making their body and mind stronger. They spend 35 hours a week building and fixing things. They spend 35 hours a week loving and caring for their family. They help out around the house. They cook healthy delicious meals. They teach their kids how to be proper humans. They do things that make their women want to tell their friends how amazing they are. They don’t sit on their fat fucking asses absorbing endless hours of bull shit. If you watch 5 or more hours of television a day, you have no self-control and you’re addicted to the screen time. I know this because prior to 2018 I used to watch at least 5 hours of Television per day and I couldn’t help myself from doing it. If you know you can’t control your poor behaviors but also know that you want to rectify them, your best option is to engineer your life in a way that makes expressing those poor behaviors impossible. If you smoke crack and you want to stop smoking crack its best not to keep a giant pile of crack sitting in your living room. Get rid of your television! 17 extra years and a worth-while healthier life are waiting for you on the other side.
DylanPearce.org 
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