Back in 2013, I tried an interesting experiment. I put down the remote for one whole day and watched TV the way I used to when I was a kid. Back then I still had a DVR with a front panel control so I could change the channel by getting up. But I couldn’t pause, I couldn’t rewind. I couldn’t skip commercials.
You know what, though… if you read the article you see that there’s something to watching TV like that. I mean no one likes commercials. That’s especially true if you have to watch the same one over and over. But, I found there’s a certain flow to life without a remote, and it’s not a bad thing.
The zen of TV watching
Watching TV without a remote is much like listening to a whole record on vinyl. It forces you to be in the moment, to pay attention to what’s right in front of you. I’m not sure I could do it all the time but every so often, I’ve repeated the experiment. I put down not only the remote but the phone and you know what? I get a lot more out of the show I’m watching and I feel more relaxed when I’m done. This is especially true if it’s one of those really dense dramas like Game of Thrones. While that show practically begs you to keep IMDB or Wikipedia open just to figure out what’s going on, looking away from the TV means you miss a lot of dialogue and action.
Try giving it up for a day or two
There’s a lot of talk these days about “mindfulness” and “things that bring you joy.” I think that if you actually put down that phone and remote and concentrate on watching TV, you’ll find two things pretty quickly:
TV is better than you think…
There’s a lot of really well-made TV out there. There’s complex drama and nuanced comedy. There’s a lot of really deep documentary stuff and some fun fantasies. But you’ll miss most of that if you spend half the show texting. Try it without the phone and you might realize how impressed you can be.
…except when it’s not
You’ll also find that there’s a fair amount of stuff you watch just so the house has some noise in it. I bet there is at least one show you tune into every single week that would be utterly intolerable if you stared right at it for an hour. Since everyone’s talking about “tossing away things that bring you joy” maybe you’ll decide to toss away some of that fake unscripted nonsense on television. If enough people do that, maybe it will go away.
Back in 2016, me and my wife dropped our cable carrier, feeling we were paying too much. Before we could find a new one, my wife was laid off so we decided that our money was best spent on food and rent, especially when Netflix was streaming, and most shows were available online. We thought we’d find a carrier when our future wasn’t so unpredictable.
Now, we have two computers at home now, one easily hooked up to the TV monitor. But I am still lost in the sweet haze of intimacy I have found again with television. So maybe we’ll keep ourselves cable free.
Or maybe not. We’re both gainfully employed now, and there are a million reasons to get cable again, along with a DVR. Maybe three years is long enough.