Life without TV.
Posted on April 28, 2008
I don’t like watching TV. It’s inefficient, annoying, and a mammoth time sink.
I do, however, like watching certain TV shows.
An hour long TV show has around 40 minutes of actual content in it. The rest is ads, station promos, credits, and sundry other cruft that I feel is a waste of my time.
I’m also not a fan of having to sit around and wait for broadcast shows to come on at a particular time, on a particular day (and I know this objection goes away for those of you in Tivo enabled parts of the world). Nor am I a fan of waiting for the show to hit the part of the world I’m in, having to avoid any mention of it online in case I get smacked in the face with a spoiler.
In short, broadcast TV is dead to me. It’s inconvenient and annoying. It exists to serve advertisers, not me, and I spurn it as I would spurn a rabid dog.
What’s my solution?
I watch TV on my schedule. In my case, I download it using bittorrent, but depending on where you live there may be better (or at least, more legal) options.
Just for the record, this isn’t because I’m cheap. I’d happily pay a subscription fee of some sort (lets say, roughly equivalent to cable charges) to someone if I could download legitimately… but I can’t, because no such facility exists. I can and do buy TV show boxed sets on DVD (some of which go unopened, as I’ve already watched the whole series; I buy them purely for the sake of giving something back to the creators).
Now, depending on where you live, you may have better options than we do - but that’s not what this post is about.
If you currently spend 3-4 hours a night in front of the (aptly named) idiot box, imagine how much you could get done with an extra 1000 hours a year.
My plans for these hours over the coming year include (not in priority order):
- Regular posts on this blog (maybe 4-5 hours a week), and routine ‘blog maintenance
- Starting a course of university study, online
- Get my level 50 Warrior to level 70 (Yes, as a matter of fact I do happen to think that computer games are a better use of my time than watching TV)
- Investigating passive and semi-passive income flows
Just as an exercise, I’d like you to spend a few minutes and imagine what you could get done in the next 12 months, if you had an extra thousand waking hours to spend. If I actually have any readers yet (I’m not sure that I do - if I do, hi there!), I’d invite them to comment - either with what you could do with 1000 hours extra in the next 12 months, or just to say hi!
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April 28, 2008 at 1:00 am
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