#6 Watch Television
Apr 14th, 2008 by doing better
You may wonder what I can possibly mean when I say that watching television is something we should do better. How can we do it better, you may ask, when it is surely the least demanding of our leisure pursuits? This warning is addressed not to those in the majority who are already avid viewers but to those wayward few of us who limit our viewing or, more controversially, choose not to have a TV in our homes at all.
If we don’t watch television, we have nothing to talk about with other people. The more years that pass without our watching the popular shows, the less we have to talk about. At first we notice that other people exchange amused glances at our expense and make jokes about how we are out of touch with popular culture. We find conversations dull because they involve celebrities, characters, and plotlines of which we have no knowledge. After a time, we find that we are labeled “boring”, and our friends are no longer available because they like to host “movie nights” from which we are excluded. Others begin to dislike us, suspecting that we are snobs. Anything else we do with our free time, such as bell ringing, bowling, or performing with a dance troupe, is further proof of our eccentricity. Because we are thinner than those who sit on a couch for many hours a day, they hate us for that, too. At the same time, we don’t aspire to the same newness and shininess as the people on TV, and we are criticized by our former friends for wearing clothes that are out of fashion. We find ourselves abandoned to the company of other social misfits, whom we find repulsive for the same reasons that we are distasteful to our friends.
If we have children, we are more exhausted than other parents because we are unable to use the TV as a babysitter, so we lose our looks and youthfulness at a faster rate. Our children are made to skip a grade at school because they have learned to read before other children and have longer attention spans; therefore they are bullied by their classmates for being younger, smaller and smarter. They also suffer social embarrassment from lacking the right toys and clothes, which they would have known about had we permitted them to watch TV. They grow up as misfits and hate us for ruining their lives. Divorce is a natural consequence of not watching television, as our spouse increasingly resents our refusal to participate in the most normal of social activities.
By this time, we have made such a point of not watching television that we could not repair the damage even if we bought a TV with eight hundred channels and watched it for twenty hours a day. We have constructed our whole persona around this stance. It is too late for us ever to become a part of wider society, and as we age we become increasingly isolated and curmudgeonly, stuck in our paranoid belief that the world is against us. At the end we find ourselves incapacitated in a nursing home, lonely and unloved, shunned by children and peers, staring at a blank wall. Shall we not admit, even in this extremity, that a TV would be better company than our own warped and decaying mind?