Kara & Michael’s Blog

Two things happened to me recently:

1. I bought issue 100 of Granta, a literary magazine of some note that I’d never heard of before. I’ve only read about fifty pages of it so far, but it’s all been thoroughly enjoyable. I realized it’s been far too long since I read anything really good — or anything substantial at all.
2. I read that the average American spends 28 hours per week watching television, that the average American gets less than 7 hours of sleep per night, and that 36% of Americans are so tired during the day that they occasionally drift off while driving.

The statistics really hit home for me. When I work out how much TV I consume on a weekly basis, it’s pretty close to the 28 hour number, and most of it is re-runs. I sleep a little more than 7 hours a night, but I have trouble falling asleep because my brain is buzzing with internet and televisual dreck. I actually play DS games to calm down at night.

Meanwhile, I feel like I have no time to do anything. It’s trendy for people in this country, especially my liberal comrades, to whine that we have no time because we work so much. While it’s true that we work more than people in almost any other country, we also enjoy a pretty good standard of living. I also think most of us are willing to accept longer hours for better pay, even when we have “enough to get by,” so we can buy the material goods that are less common in those other countries.

Like the average American, I rarely work more than 45 hours a week, so I’m not going to complain about the time I spend working — especially when I consider how much time I spend in front of the tube.

A couple of weeks ago I built a MythTV box for our bedroom at home, which we’ve used for watching TV and as a general-purpose desktop computer. As a side effect, the monitor from my desktop PC has ended up in the bedroom, attached to the MythTV box, and I find myself not using my desktop PC anymore. My computer time during the evenings is down to about 15 minutes a day to check my email, plus the occasional administration for 4d2.org. So, having freed myself from the clutches of internet distraction, what have I done with all the spare time I’ve gained during the evening? I’ve started watching more TV.

There are so many things that I want to do — cook more, get in shape, keep our apartment clean, entertain more — and my constant complaint is that I don’t have time. How do I rationalize this when I spend almost 30 hours a week watching stuff like syndicated re-runs of Cops?

People are always ready to vilify TV and its role in American society, but TV is just a symptom. The focus of life in these United States, at least in my estimation, is no longer on gaining experiences but on gaining information. We don’t want to go explore a new park, or even take a walk, but we want instant news around the clock. We want more pixels. We want all our favorite content aggregated via RSS (apologies to anyone reading this via our feed). The consumer culture isn’t about accruing material wealth, it’s about saving the time we’re wasting pursuing information — buying a GPS device for the car so we can get where we’re going 5 minutes faster, offsetting the 5 minutes longer it takes to channel-surf now that we have 200 TV channels to mind. Being able to afford fancy meals at chain restaurants that offer nothing in the way of new experiences, just the convenience of not having to cook and the illusion of luxury. This is what our society has become, and I am every bit as guilty of buying into it as you.

What does 24-hour access to breaking news bring us but stress? Is watching four hours of television really the way you want to spend time with your family? What, exactly, are you escaping from when you spend all day playing your MMORPG of choice?

I wonder what I would do if I stopped watching television. I would have neither that nor the internet to occupy me. Would I sit in the fetal position in the middle of the living room until bedtime, or would I be forced to find a–gasp–hobby?

I really have no idea.

I am going to stop watching TV and see what happens. It’s something I’ve done before, for short periods of time, but never without the safety net of an internet-connected computer at the ready. I don’t know what I will do without the constant influx of information. Perhaps I will go mad. In any event, I will write about it.