05 Sep I Turned Off the TV for a Week and Here’s What Happened

We’ve all heard the stats about how much time Americans spend watching TV or in front of a screen, and most of us either need to do better or want to do better.  Before our son was born my wife worked and always got home from work before me and would have TV on while doing whatever she was doing around the house.  Sometimes she was sitting there watching it and other times she was making dinner or taking care of things around the house.  My job has historically been a bit stressful and very stressful at times, but I always asked that when the garage door opened whatever was on TV was turned off or at a minimum couldn’t be Gilmore Girls or Kardashians or some other version of what I declare as “trash TV.”  This post isn’t about my wife’s TV choices back then, and I don’t consider Gilmore Girls trash TV. I just hate the show because they say about 6,000 words a second back and forth to each other, trash TV is the “reality TV” world mostly, in any case, I wanted to come into a quieter house or at least have something neutral on the TV.

I always found it odd when I went to my in-law’s house for a gathering whether it be just a few of us there or a larger gathering of four to five families for a holiday or birthday event, the TV was almost never on.  Most places I spent time, including my own house growing up the TV was pretty much always on.  In my single years I had a TV in my bedroom and went to sleep with a movie or tv show on nearly every night and would wake up at whatever hour and turn it off and go back to sleep.  Recently my sister who just moved back to America having previously lived abroad in China had said at random, “You are like the only people other than us that we spend time with that don’t keep the TV on all the time when we come to your house.”  Interesting observation, sister.  She’s right, our TV isn’t on current day except for my son’s morning and post nap wake-up shows, after he’s in bed when we watch our sixty to ninety minutes of Netflix, and Minnesota Vikings Football Sundays.  This wasn’t always the case and we used to watch a ton of TV and movies, we were shamelessly TV junkies and it was kind of funny to tell people when they’d ask what we do for fun or what we’ve been up to lately, we would just laugh and say we had or were watching an incredible amount of TV.  We had more time on our hands back then after dinner and surely, we did other things, but we had some marathon TV sessions.

This writing was titled “I turned off my TV for a week and here’s what happened” so I should probably get there.  Rewinding back to my wife’s former career before our son was born, she traveled periodically for work.  I knew I didn’t like coming home to certain TV shows on so when she was gone this one specific week for about four nights, I just didn’t turn the TV on when I got home to something I might like. I didn’t turn the TV on while I ate dinner alone on the couch, or when I was done taking care of whatever I was doing that evening around the house.  I listened to some music, read, probably caught up on some work from my laptop, but I never turned on the TV.  It was peaceful, relaxing and I didn’t feel like I was really missing out on anything that I should have been watching or catching up on.

I mentioned my accidental experiment to her, and we left the TV off much more beginning at that point and I think this event became the starting point of getting rid of cable along with a new monthly invoice that was towering, I’m sure.  We found ourselves looking through our recorded series and upcoming recorded series and it was just so much TV, and eventually we did a cross comparison of what shows we felt like we couldn’t live without at the time, discovering we could get them on Hulu, or Netflix and some of them we’d lose out on forever.  What’s interesting is when you don’t have commercials, and TV on as background noise from cable TV, you don’t even know what you are missing out on, or not seeing unless someone brings it up.

When our son was born we didn’t have to make a transition to not having the TV on for him to watch, a lot of new parents’ goal is to limit their kid’s screen times and the TV being on all the time for parents to watch makes it tough to keep your little one from watching, too.  Oddly enough wheel of fortune was our vice back then when he was born so we’d have it on daily and have to keep redirecting his attention, but I guess he just loved watching that wheel spin, and the sparkling dresses.  We’ve since stopped watching even the wheel as my grandma called it, but we do watch our sixty to ninety minutes a night of Netflix or Hulu, and even that can be limiting as one or the other might fall asleep during it.

We turned our TV off, and we found peace, quiet, and other healthier things to do to fill our time.  We don’t regret it and I am happy to let it hang on the wall unused twenty hours a day or more.