Last weekend I was in Dallas for a close friend who was getting married. It was the Friday before the wedding and I had some time to kill. So I walked around Dallas for a few hours. That’s my favorite way to explore the city. I eventually got hungry and settled on a restaurant in uptown. After ordering I sat outside to enjoy the nice Texas weather. Which funny enough looked the exact same as a winter in Seattle (clouds, dark, rainy).
A waitress slowly walked up behind me, looking concerned. She asked what I was doing, making sure I was ok. I wasn’t doing anything crazy, just looking out across the city and thinking. It took me a while to realize that she was concerned because I wasn’t engrossed in my phone. Checking X, Instagram, or TicTok. After realizing this I told her that I was trying to stare at my phone less and was enjoying the new city. Maybe she thought I just got dumped and was looking grimly out on this cruel world. Or that I just got fired and was re-evaluating my life choices. Overall she was concerned because I was not looking at my phone to pass the time. Now that definitely concerned me.
Weeks before this incident I made conscious decision to unsubscribe and delete all TV/Movie streaming apps. Things like Hulu with live TV, Netflix, MAX, Paramount+. I had them all. And they all had to go. Why would I do something so crazy! The explanation is simple my dear Watson. I wanted to create more opportunities to be bored in my life. Call me crazy, but it’s working out better than I’d imagined.
When I was a college freshman at Kansas, circa 2012, I was part of a fraternity. As a rule, all pledges of the fraternity were not allowed to have any form of TV or video game console in their room. I like to think it was to give parents peace of mind that they would be studying more than goofing off. But the real goal was something entirely different. When 40 pledges can’t pass time by watching TV they have to do other things. Together. Instead of binge watching a show alone in your room you now have to be a real human being and get together with other pledges to pass the time. My older brother, who was two years older and in the fraternity, knew this when he bought me a dart board as a present before school started. He said I would use this more than anything else in my room. You know what? He was absolutely right. That dart board become a sort of water cooler that allowed other pledges to come to my room and pass the time by playing darts. In addition to darts, we did all sorts of crazy things to pass the time in between classes. One week it was playing cards. Another it was creating playlists on Spotify. We even created a sacred coffee ritual before we all went off to study each night. This included a special coffee blend, singing an old Folgers jingle from the 90s, and maybe a little dance if we were feeling up to it. My mom even knew what to expect when I bought a desk chair before school started. She said I needed to get the cheapest one because she knew with absolute certainty that it was going to get destroyed through activities like chair racing and playing a form of floor hockey while riding a chair. That was a common activity when my older brother was a pledge. Safe to say, that chair did not make it through my freshman year unscathed. All of those activities may sound dumb, but that’s how each pledge got to know each other. Going from strangers to brothers in a short six months.
Cutting out all streaming apps from my life allowed me to help recreate the kind of boredom I felt in college to do things that were actually good for me. Instead of watching a show for four hours like a zombie. There are simply too many good shows and movies out right now. All at our fingertips waiting to be watched. This creates an opportunity to always be entertained, always have something to occupy your mind. That kind of stimulation cannot be good for us, and that’s why I’m trying to remove it from my life.
Here are a few other reasons why I wanted to remove TV from my daily equation:
- Time suck: You can easily watch TV for eight hours straight on a Saturday. That is time you just never get back. Robert Green has an idea called “alive time vs dead time”. Alive time is doing things that are creative and beneficial to your life. Things like reading, writing, painting. Dead time is essentially a waste and time you never get back. Things like watching TV or scrolling social media. Alive time gives you life, while dead time takes it away from you.
- News is bad for you: Most news out there is about terrible things happening in the world. That’s what creates the most viewers, which bring in ad revenue to stay on air. Humans are not designed to know everything bad going on in the world at once. It’s a form of sensory overload that leaves us more anxious and pessimistic about societies future. It’s a form of entertainment junk food.
- TV meeting your social needs: I think an unnoticed impact from TV is that it fills a lot of the socialization needs us humans crave every day. A feeling of being with friends or loved ones. Instead of going out to hang with a friend, you might just stay in and hang out with your friends that live inside a TV show. An introvert like me can only have so much social stimulation in a day, and watching too much TV leaves less opportunities to socialize with real people.
- TV to forget problems: Ever had a bad day at the office and come home to watch a funny sitcom to relax? We’ve all done it. And in moderation it’s probably an ok thing to do. But if you’re doing that every day after work, then you are just numbing bigger problems in your life. TV won’t fix that, it just delays the problem for another time. Which can eventually blow up in your face. Taking that salve away gives us no choice but to face problems in our lives. Giving us the time to actually do something about versus just get by another day.
Now my dear reader, you might still think I’m insane. What do you do with all of this newfound boredom? Aren’t people who say they don’t own a TV just pretentious do****s? Here’s how I now spend my time:
- Books: When TV is out of the question, you can easily crush 2+ books a week. Books become your constant companion. I’ve recently fallen back in love with fiction books. For over a decade I’ve been strictly reading non-fiction at a clip of 1-2 books per month. Now I read multiple non-fiction and fiction books at once. And it’s amazing. You know how people say the book was better than the movie? They are usually right. What was a 2.5 hour movie is actually a 300+ page book that takes over 10 hours to read. Talk about bang for your buck.
- Music: Sitting down to solely listen to music has been lost on me the last decade. As a teenager a good song could change my life, but in recent years I haven’t ventured out of my old favorites. Now I sit down and explore new artists, albums, and deep cuts from my top bands. This is now the most relaxing thing I do. Nothing fixes a rough day like a good playlist.
- Sports: The biggest drawback of no TV is no live sports. I love everything soccer and Kansas City sports. So whenever I want to go watch a game I now have to get off my butt and go watch it somewhere. This now forces me to be in the company of others, most often close friends. This leads me to my next point.
- Get out of the house: TV is the ultimate ball and chain tying you to your house. Without it I now have pressure to get out into the world and explore what’s going on in my community. Art shows. Farmers markets. Anything and everything going on in the world is now at my disposal since I literally have nothing better to do. I now can’t say no to things because if I did I would just be bored at home. This creates more serendipity in my life.
- TV in the wild: Coming across a movie or show when I’m out and about is now a treat. I enjoy it 100x more because it doesn’t happen that often. Last weekend my Alaska Airlines flight had free movies I could watch. I chose a new Guy Ritchie movie about WW2 and it blew my mind. I wouldn’t have appreciated it in the same way if it was the third movie I watched on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
Who knows, maybe in a months time I will relapse and sign back up for all of the streaming apps I quit. But so far it’s been a good experience. Maybe try it out yourself for a few weeks and see how it might improve your life. I think we all need to engineer more opportunities to be bored. Because when we’re bored, that’s when good ideas come to us and when serendipity can change your life forever.