Over the last couple of days I thought up a second experiment. I would like to know if you participate, and I would like to know the results. I would like to know if you can stop watching T.V. and reading the newspaper for 7 days. For some of you this will be easy. For some of you, this will be a monumental task. But, it’s just 7 days.

Why?

Four reasons:

First, T.V. shuts you down. If there is a T.V. on in a room, I am drawn to it. I feel compelled to watch it. I can’t hold conversations, I can’t focus, and I find that I can’t function. It’s a powerful draw, and I can sit for hours, just wasting time that I will never be able to recapture. It is time that I could have spent doing something that I actually enjoy. Or time that I could be at least thinking about something that I enjoy. When I stopped watching, I reclaimed so much time during the day that I found that I had time for most of the things that I felt compelled to do, along with the things that I wanted to do.

Second, the T.V. is not your friend. It cannot interact with you, and you cannot interact with it. How often do you come in and throw on the T.V. for background noise? I used to do it all the time. It makes it feel like someone is there with you. But, they’re not. You are alone, and you cannot even enjoy it. If we are lonely, we should call out to someone, not something. The T.V. is actually preventing you getting the interaction that you need by providing a false sense that you are interacting with someone. If you are not lonely, the T.V. is not letting you enjoy something that we have forgotten: solitude, peace, and being truly at rest.

Third, the name “News” is misleading. The “news” is full of things that you do not need to know. Most things that appear in the news are things that happen in places that you will never visit, involving people that you will never know driven by circumstances that you will never encounter. By knowing the information, you are not helping yourself. You are focusing on issues that will never touch you rather than the issues at hand. And you will think about those images and stories not only for the hour that you watch it. You will be affected for time to come, wasting brain cycle after brain cycle.

Fourth, most of those stories that you see/read are negative. Really negative. Horrific, usually. You are bombarded with atrocities that, whether you think they do or not, affect how you feel. They affect how you act. They affect how you view the world. The world is not as the T.V. makes it out to be. And you are not the person that T.V. makes you out to be. You are kinder, and more relaxed, and much happier.

So, give it a try. Some of you are going to be bored, some will be agitated for no reason, and some of you are going to change. Experiment with your life. It’s yours to do with as you please.

Or you can blow off that hippy crap and watch some short films from Atomic Cartoons. I was really impressed that it was Flash…

Posted in Philosophical BS, TV