The NextGen Cord Homecomer: Why, after a decade of being a cord cutter, I returned to pay TV.

We hear a lot of new buzz words these days in the media industry, many of them relating to television trends.

Cord cutters. Cord shavers. Cord nevers. Going over the top. Millennials. On fleek.

Still not sure about that last one. But, there's one word that's a little bit old school that's making a comeback. We don't use it often, but for those of us who work in (or just use a lot of) digital media, it's a feeling with which we're all too familiar.

Fatigue.

Fatigue is a thing.

It is now endemic to our culture. It's the new black. And it comes in many forms. There's password fatigue. All the damned passwords you need to remember. Some need a capital letter and others need a special character and inevitably they just end up being some random mashup of your kid's names and the year you got married. M@tPat$uz92. Every Russian hacker knows your password. Though it comes as odd relief, you're mostly uninteresting enough to escape a cyberbreach. If your password is so banal that it's that easily guessed, you're not a juicy target (I jest, but not by much).

Then there's subscription fatigue. So many subscriptions. My Netflix subscription. My Amazon subscription. My iTunes subscription. My Spotify subscription. My Stars subscription (for the Outlander series). My NY Times digital subscription. My Evernote subscription. My HBO subscription. My AAA subscription. My wine club subscription. Some utilitarian. Some not. But all seemingly needed for basic functioning and water cooler conversation. I never know when they renew, what new features they offer, and I wouldn't remember how to cancel one if I had to. I just let them roll, and every month, curse my bank balance, reminding myself that next month I'll figure out a better way to manage it all.

Let's not forget discovery fatigue. If I need to find a pizza delivery place, I spend an hour scouting reviews on Yelp. If I need to make a dinner reservation, I search on Open Table. I spend a few hours on Air B&B seeking inspiration for my next vacation spot and run a few scenarios on Google flights, to see when I could get the best airfare. And then I settle in to watch Netflix, usually taking around 45 minutes to page through their new "user friendlier" UI, multiple scrolls, arrows, swipes and clicks with my clunky old remote, just find a 30 minute episode of something to which I'll fall asleep in 2 minutes.

We live in a complicated world.

Everything is hard. It's impossible to keep up. Wires tangle. Watches need docking. New versions come out. Auto-renew happens. And everything...EVERYTHING...requires an update. This app doesn't work. My wifi needs rebooting. What does this light on my car dashboard mean and how much will it cost me to turn it off? It feels like our tools are using us, the services we thought were money and time savers are now money and time suckers. Yeah, suckers. We feel like suckers and we're left at the end of the day feeling tired and broken; defeated by the very machines and algorithms we invented.

Companies like Sling and Hulu and others are creating subscription based products for the annuity stream and it almost feels like they're taking advantage of those of us who always harbored the secret guilt for not choosing accounting as a major. From your razors to your fish food, everything is a club you join. And the most costly of those clubs are the media tech clubs. Thankfully, The Verge created a handy tool for helping you calculate the cost of your media subscriptions in their Cord Cutter's Guide. If you add all the standard video subscriptions you total about $128 per month, not including the price of high speed Internet, which would put you around $180 per month or more. Roughly the same price as Tier II cable.

But here's the rub. Though you might be selective and save a little money by going a la carte, you STILL have to authenticate with all your passwords, manage all your subscriptions and figure out a way to find the content you want based on what you're in the mood for, comparing what's in one app, to what's in another. And by the time you do all that...you know what you're feeling? Yup. You guessed it. Tired. Really effin tired. Or as the liberal elite like to say...

Fatigued.

So here's the revelation. Wait for it...

Managing your digital life costs you money, time and energy. But cable TV just costs money.

And that is why I've become a Cord Homecomer. I've finally decided to admit that I on certain days, at certain times, in certain contexts, I really don't want to work so hard for my entertainment. I don't want to untangle my headphones, nor do I want to feel naked without them, just so I can watch The Voice on my iPad. You see, sometimes, I don't want to work for my entertainment. I work all the time, so when I come home, the last things I want to spend my time doing is encrypting and curating an experience. This is my down time. My come home and have dinner on the table, let my dog bring my slippers, let me plop my ass into my favorite chair and let me "watch my shows" while I fall asleep, time. Now granted, that mood only happens occasionally. What I ultimately long for is an experience that makes me feel something. It turns out, I am looking for an authentic experience, not an experience authenticating. And that's why sometimes, I just want TV to be TV. Plain old, Grandpa watching his shows, TV. That is my generic expectation of the passive industrial mindset that dominated the 50s. Watch things flow by on a conveyor belt and the least objectionable program.

I want television to be a passive, lean back, Barcalounger kinda thing. I want to have an authentic experience, not an experience authenticating.

And having cable TV is a glorious, guilty pleasure - almost like a place to rest. It's the 50s domestic Leave It to Beaver fantasy we were once sold. The TV is on while I'm doing laundry. It's on at the end of a long day when I really can't think anymore. The white noise runs in the background, drowning out the noise in my head as I follow a recipe that reads something like "cut a one inch slit in the plastic and blah blah blah on high for 4-5 minutes as microwaves vary." It's a companion to the dog, who appreciates the soothing voices of the football game commentators, as opposed to my stilted cursing at an app update that got suspended.

With pay TV there is familiarity without complexity. Cable TV is like coming home to your parents's house the summer before your last year in college. You're all set up. You were missed. The bed is made, there are clean towels, dinner is there, you can watch the game on the couch. Cable TV is always there if I want it. It's reliable. And it's the best deal going. Perhaps it is the last best deal going. It's a service. A real true service. And there isn't much of that in our DIY world anymore. You cannot really hack your own TV. Go ahead. Try that.

Service is a luxury. Or that's how it all seems nowadays, because we build our own Ikea furniture and try on our own Warby Parker glasses and sell our own crap on eBay and buy more stuff from Amazon. We fly to Europe on Norwegian airlines, super cool, but the meal... they never get the meal right. We have been educated in our digital culture to see the stripped down version of everything as raw, unbundled necessities without the marketing hype and product bloat. Service is a padded luxury that comes with all the notions of "corporate." Digital is cool and edgy and recyclable and more conscious.

And yet, I entreat you, that if we were all just a tiny bit more aware, we'd acknowledge that we live in a world of wants, not needs. We don't need two mobile phones. We don't need a bigger data plan. We don't need to watch the basketball game while we're walking the dog. We don't need to upgrade. We don't need a $149 watch band on our Apple watch. We need food. Clothing. Shelter. And rest. And we need to recover our time and our energy. Because time (and control over it), are commodities that are fast becoming luxuries in this autobahn paced world. Spend your money. But protect your time and your energy. You can't get more of those two things. They are the essence of our humanity.

You see, I just want TV to be TV. That's it. It's that simple.

Still think you can't afford cable? Can I just tell you what a steal the triple play is? First of all, it comes with Internet. High speed Internet. So if I'm feeling especially frisky and want to check my Facebook page while I watch TV, I can do that without managing any other subscription. I can also actually google something and get a result with none of that annoying delaying pinwheeling business.

Secondly, there are a bazillionbillion channels. They're all organized in a guide, they have times and dates and descriptions and if I don't want to watch them now, I can record them right there, with a little DVR control and watch the favored show when I'm ready. No appointment and no app needed. If I can't find something to watch, well then I'm truly pathetic and obviously should get off the couch, go do something, so that when I come back, I'm sufficiently and appropriately tired enough to want to just chill out with potato chips and a rerun. It's okay to not work for everything. It's okay to be passive sometimes. If you're out all day making the world a better place, then when you get home, relax. Watch TV.

I mean, my goodness, we're not machines.

Thirdly, no passwords. Not one. Not one! Do you have any idea what a time saver this is? Do you know how hard it is to type M@tPat$uz92 with an AppleTV remote? Never again! I just turn the cable TV on and it plays! Automatically! Did I mention it comes notification free? TV is pop up free, unlike all the random popups that block my mobile web content or the alerts that are now blowing up my iphone thanks to iOS 10's incessant alert feature and the iCloud sneakypants-sync. (I use blowing up figuratively, not literally, in the Samsung sense.)

Not to mention, I am finally in the loop. Want to hear breaking news? No need to piece together the puzzle of a random Twitter feed filled with trolls or scour through various fake news posts on social platforms. Simply turn on a 24/7 News channel and get actual fact checked news from people with nice voices and attractive faces who are well dressed and seem to genuinely have your best interests at heart. Pick from a few with different points of view and come to your own conclusions. Far better than the 140 word pissing contests to which you add your blessing if you agree, or retweet and wait to be liked as you play out your own real life Black Mirror script.

Want the weather? Why suffer through Dark Sky trying to see the radar (which I love) or spend 15 mins trying to interpret the wind patterns of the NOAA app (which I also love) when in 2 seconds, you'll have someone literally showing and telling you all about the weather! Two words: Janice Huff.

Cable TV is awesome. I didn't realize how much I missed it.

I don't have to worry I'll miss the big game because my app is crashing or my password needs resetting or that I can't find it. No mo FOMO. FOMO is for those who cut the cord. I was never culturally current when I was a cord cutter. Sure I was geeky. I was an original hipster who didn't have cable in the 90s. And maybe that was hip. For like a hot second. But I was somewhat less civilized. And frankly, that gets old. We are sorely lacking in civility these days. TV is old school and civilized, unlike Twitter.

And then there's the phone. That is included for the price of cable. If someone wants to call me, they can talk to me via my phone with my phone number. Shocker. NO ONE has my number. Not a single robot tele-marketer! Why? Because they're all busy spamming my email. No butt dials from friends. Pure beautiful silence. Only I make the calls. Pizza place is on speed dial. Life is good.

You'd think all this time saving stuff in our fast paced world of superficiality, there'd be a lack of quality. Just the opposite. The video quality on the TV, the Internet speed and the audio quality on the phone are excellent. Not a single glitch or hiccup. No buffering. No crashing after a mid roll, no dropped signal. Everything high definition and high functioning. It all just works. It's like magic (noting this sentiment is similar to how my Mom describes her iPad after I've spent 2 hours getting her connected to the wifi, logged into her email and social media accounts, etc. - did I mention time and energy suck? Not my mom, the tech wrangling!)

Listen. Here's the deal. This whole post is very cheeky. Not gonna lie, I've been a cord cutter for well over a decade. I love technology. I jest about it's challenges. I work in this industry. Challenges are what I do, I create products that solve some of these problems, I bring content to people who would never have been able to see it before, and evolve new forms of storytelling using time honored literary principles. Technology is awesome. Perhaps because I liked technology, perhaps because I work in the industry, perhaps because I was anxious to see how all these startups would evolve, I learned to use and love all forms of digital technology. I was an early adopter of smartphones and tablets and casting sticks and all the various subscriptions that go with them. I bought the first iPhone the day it came out, back when there were only 700 apps in the app store. I played Angry Birds the day it launched for 172 hours straight until I got through all the levels. I played multiplayer Halo with 14 year olds in France at 4am. And to my great pride, I designed apps that brought every single event of the Olympics to audiences for the first time in an historic media event, watching athletes from my home state and around the world, achieve lifelong dreams, which their friends and family could watch in real time and through those devices. We sent each of those interested fans over 700 million event alerts in 18 days. So make no mistake. Digital is bad assery. It's all really cool. And I will continue to crush on it . But what has it all taught me? That it is a tool. An awesome, amazing tool to be used. And for some of us, we lose sight of the fact that our tools are using us, more than we're using them.

So...it's come to this.

Coming home to cable. Reattaching the cord I once cut. Oh, I'll still keep my Netflix and my Amazon Prime (and for sure my wine subscription). And I'll continue to work in media tech. Because it's my belief that it has enhanced our lives in many many ways. And there's a James Bond quality to technology that just makes it really cool. Digital is fun. And it's awesome. And it's convenient. And it is really useful. I like being able to pull out my phone and watch sports clips, or shop for sneakers. But it's different than TV. It's a different experience. And that is the point. It takes some work. Digital is still in very early days. We are, as my former colleague and friend the ever insightful Ben Tannebaum used to say, "pioneering the digital frontier."

Sometimes going through the technical plow fields can take it's toll. So when I'm in the mood to veg out on the couch ... ? Well, all I have to do now is push one simple button. Without further effort, I can fall asleep to the Tonight Show, like the generations before me. Cable TV has made it's big return to my living room. I am for sure part of the digerati. But while I am getting the triple play discount, I am also a cord homecomer.