The no-TV decade

About 10 years ago or so my wife and I go rid of our TV. It wasn't a politcal or social or spiritual statement at the time, we just lived out in the country where reception was poor and cable expensive. If anything, it was (ironically) due to laziness: during a roofing project one summer we had to take down our aerial, and it just never got put back. Before long, life without TV had become so content and peaceful that it was hard to imagine wanting to put it back. (Okay: we still keep a DVD player in the basement for the occasional movie night or Corner Gas party with the kids, so I guess we're not purists.)

I read an old article by Robert MacNeil a long time ago. He extrapolated figures from the daily viewing hours of the average Canadian, to suggest that in the time saved by not watching TV over a lifetime, one could actually be reading Homer's Odyssey in its original Greek, having used those 3 hours a day to master the language. I haven't tackled Homer yet, but I have read the Greek New Testament 4 times, so maybe MacNeil was on to something. Among other projects that filled up those 21 spare hours a week (which, over the course of one TV-free decade, adds up to about 10,920 hours, or 455 days, or 1.2 years), I learned to play a passable piano and an okay saxophone, tried my hand at video editing and gardening and music recording and art and acting, read a lot of books, and even tried my hand at writing one (unpublishable), along with a musical (unperformable), and about 90 or so songs.

Now in most of these cases, "my hand" turned out to be not particularly adept, but my point is that I had a lot of fun--1.2 years worth of fun. And there's not much I'd trade those 10,920 hours for - not even for the chance to talk knowingly about all the episodes of Survivor I missed over the last ten years.