Life without television
Posted by Dubbayoo | Filed under General
On average, American adults now watch more than four hours of television per day. That’s four hours wasted every day, four hours squandered on gaping into the vapid, make-believe world of the little screen.
That’s four hours not spent talking with loved ones, helping kids with homework, volunteering in one’s community or doing any of the wonderful things that bring meaning to life. That’s one-sixth of your time on earth.
I was talking to my friend Bikinimom last night. She doesn’t have television at home and that immediately got the wheels in my mind spinning at an increased pace. Typically I do not watch a lot of tv but I do have it on quite a bit. Since I have a short attention I spend a fair amount of time flipping channels just so I can ignore something more exciting.
It made me wonder how much time each day I lose to the boob tube. I told Bikinimom it’d be interesting to try it for a month and find out and without hesitation she said “Do it! Do it!”….and so I will.
From now til the end of April I will try to keep the tv off. I don’t actually expect to make it the entire month without any tv. First, I have no intention of missing Lost, unless it’s a repeat which is an all too frequent occurence. Second I gotta have my Cyclism Sunday on OLN…two hours of pro cycling coverage. There’s too little cycling on all year to miss anything good and the European spring classics are on now. I definitely won’t be doing this in July when the Tour de France is on everyday.
In celebration of this feat I have set some goals for the month:
Total tv hours – <10
Workouts – 22
Miles biked – 400
Miles run – 25
Pounds lost – 5
Pages read – 600 (not a lot but one of the books I’ll be reading is MySQL so I’ll probably read each page 2-3 times.)
I tried something similiar a long long time ago. For three months I limited myself to one hour of television per day while I was studying for the NASD Series 7 & 63 exams. The Series 7 exam was 300 mind-bending questions over 6 hours covering all types of corporate securities, except commodities and futures. It has a first time failure rate of nearly 70%. I passed quite easily but it was undoubtedly the hardest thing I’ve ever worked for in my life thus far.
To christen this new adventure I awoke at 5:20 AM and rode the bike for 35 minutes, followed by a shower and an omelet made with 1 cup of egg whites, 2 whole eggs, cheddar cheese washed down with Gatorade.
