I don't own a TV

Okay, the title is not 100% true. We do have one in our basement that the kids use for a Nintendo Switch maybe once a month. But truthfully, I have no idea at all when the last time was that I watched anything on it.

The last time I watched anything was LOTR on my laptop, and I’m thinking that was…over the winter? I don’t know. And before I go on, this isn’t condemnation to anyone who watches TV. I don’t care. No, it’s more me thinking out loud about what I’ve noticed.

First, it wasn’t really intentional. We didn’t set out to stop watching TV; it just sort of happened on its own. My wife and I had a TV in our bedroom and we’d binge shows after a baby was born (which happened a lot). The most embarrassing (I really am embarrassed to admit this one) was getting sucked into Yellowstone. It’s a terrible show by every metric, and I wanted all of the key characters to get eaten by a bear.

But more to the point, something dawned on me a couple of years ago: I invested forty hours of my life into a crappy, trashy soap opera. Forty hours of my life that could have gone into learning SEO, or learning guitar, or writing my own trashy novel. Almost anything would have been a better use of my time than watching TV (Yellowstone in particular).

That baby just turned two last month, and we have basically watched no TV since then. We didn’t watch a single snap of football last season (I used to be a huge college football fan, so this is odd behavior for sure). And after a while, it just became normal to not watch anything. Right now, I can’t even imagine how I’d feel if I sat down and watched TV.

Look, it doesn’t matter to me who watches TV and who doesn’t most people watch several hours per week, some several hours per day. This isn’t a self-absorbed screed about how much better my habits are than yours. It’s about recognizing a time suck in my life, and removing it from my life. And when it has been gone so long, you can’t even fathom having it back because that would mean something else, something useful, would have to go.

Your time is precious. It is finite. When those seconds tick past, there are no replacements. Make sure you are using those seconds, minutes, hours, and days wisely. I know for a fact that I can’t get almost two days of my life back from Yellowstone, but I won’t make that same mistake again.