No really. My only TV is in a sack. In the closet.
Now before anyone jumps into thinking I’m either so amazing or I’m super judgey mcjudgerson over here, please note we still have laptops and an iPad, so it’s not like we have cut out watching anything- just sacked the main culprit in the time suck wars at our house.
With a TV and antennae ( I mean, we cancelled cable years ago, so we had that basic package of channels), even though the variety offered was a concoction of rerun sit coms, doom and gloom media, ‘reality tv’, Extra with Mario Lopez and infomercials, I would find myself getting sucked into it.
TVs are no longer small, so naturally we had a large ish flat screen- what ‘American’ family doesn’t these days, right? And it being big, it was plastered to the wall in a very prominent place. Side note here- have any of us stopped to think that with our family room or largest room in house totally oriented around the TV, we are in essence creating a temple paying homage to the entertainment gods of NBC, CBS, FOX … what have you? One may wonder if a people in the far, far, far distant future unearth a typical suburban household from our era, they would create a whole mythology around the shiny black box and think we worshipped it or something based on our room’s orientation and seeing any paraphernalia from our era depicting the box’s ability to have us all in a trance for hours staring at it… But I digress.
In this whole journey to a zero waste lifestyle, one aspect that is so highlighted i technicolor is time. Time is needed to make this stuff happen- this planning, this prep- and time is needed to still be with my family and enjoy them- not a big screen and them, but with them: playing- reading- coloring- hiking- and perhaps food prepping together too. So anything that is a total waste of time, a time sucker, should be sacked. And what I found myself doing too often was flicking on the TV to have it on in “the background” of doing something, but then getting sucked into the muck and mire or it’s offerings. Literally sucked into shows about women fighting each other for one douche guy who is dating all 30 of them, shows depicting the latest divorcee in Hollywood, or tuning in for that game show I’ve seen a thousand million times where I think I can be smarter then the contestants and that Pat hears me when I yell out “come on, come on…buy a flipping’ vowel already!!!” Time literally gets sucked from my world and I blink and it’s super late- bed time. What a true waste.
But I still kept it. Kept it going until I noticed my soon to be 4 year old daughter getting sucked in too! Not to those shows of course- but to the myriad of after school shows and just wasting her afternoons away. And then it clicked- we can control what we watch and how much by sticking to our laptop/ipads and using Hulu, Netflix, Amazon… and then choosing, like, one thing a day. And there are these lovely things like Circle and other native apps that allow you to set timers that shut off those screens. We limited our daughter’s watching time to 30 to 45 minutes a day tops ( except for the occasional Saturday night family movie). This was working great! Until she would notice the massive TV on it’s altar, just beckoning her- and then the tears, and the screams, and the fighting… just ugh.
So we talked, and the sack was the solution. So down that TV came. Now we have a lovely gallery of family pictures up to remind us what is truly important with our time.
We do miss the big TV for the occasional movie night, but other than that, our household has seemed more peaceful AND we have started listening to NPR radio! And guess what, it makes you smarter instead of dumber,- so score! And did you knwo the awesome OPB / NPR radio shows that are on Saturday and Sunday afternoons- they are funny, smart, witty, educational and can be played in the background to our family doing crafts, playing with legos , food prepping… so great.
If my family is truly going to head towards our goal or a simpler lifestyle, and my dream goal of a small house with forested property, we need to like each other, like being with each other, in the same room- not segmented out in a man cave, or video gaming room, or craft room… we need to learn to live in the same space. So this is a step in that direction. In the future we are talking of getting a projector for those movie nights we miss- but if we do, it shall stay hidden from sight and used for when we introduce our kids to Star Wars someday.