Being a child of this generation, watching TV was such an integral part of my life that was hard to imagine a day going by without doing it.  It had gotten to the point where I would watch TV just for the sake of watching it, even if nothing was on, and would spend all my time in front of the TV when I came home on break from college to “make up for lost time” as I didn’t have time to watch while I was there.  For me, having TV, especially cable and later all those premium movie channels, made it so much easier to waste time, laying around and being a couch potato, procrastinating doing anything productive and useful and I guess my parents felt the same as they have been trying for a long time to cut back on the amount of TV that is watched in our house.

I am sure that I am not the only kid out there who has had to deal with parents complaining about me watching too much TV, calling it the “idiot box” and saying that it rots your mind.  My father has tried many different ways to cut down our TV watching time ranging from threats of throwing away the TV or getting rid of cable to time limits per day or week.  Of course none of these approaches worked as the threats were recognized as being empty and the time limits were fairly easy to cheat on so my parents gave up for a while and we continued with our mind-numbing obsession with TV, but a few months ago a new plan was born.

It all started one day when I was sitting in my dorm room at college reading and listening to some music when I hear the phone ring.  I pick up the phone and am surprised that it is my brother calling and even more astonished by the reason why he called.  Apparently, he and my parents were having a discussion at home and had decided to attempt a new approach at ridding the family of the evil influences of television, namely going pretty much cold turkey and giving up TV altogether.  They called because they wanted my opinion as to what I thought about the and whether I would be willing to go along with it.  In the beginning I wasn’t very happy with the idea because I don’t really watch any TV while at school because I am usually too busy with other stuff and I was looking forward to coming home at the end of the year and just relaxing in front of the TV.  But then, I thought about it and decided why not, I mean it wasn’t like I wasn’t surviving here without TV so what’s the big deal and so I agreed.

The first thing my parents did was get rid of cable because, not only was it a waste of money at this point, it was a great temptation to bend the rules when no one was around to call you on it.  It was then that I realized that they were really serious about this and this wouldn’t just be a little experiment like the others.  At first it was somewhat hard, everyone being tempted to cut corners a bit and watch their occasional favorite TV show and we made allowances for special events like the Oscars and major sports events, but now we are at the point of no return.  It is amazing to me, looking back at myself and thinking about how much TV I watched, that now I can go through my days without even thinking about turning the TV on as in the thought doesn’t even cross my mind.  Of course, this has resulted in my brother and I overcompensating by spending more time on the internet, but that is a problem for another time.

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