The Decade of No TV

I drafted this a while ago, but now that I’m doing the media ecology reread, this seems like a good overture.

I sometimes forget — it’s so long ago now — that there was a period of more than ten years where I went months at a time without watching television, and watched movies basically only by prior arrangement. I didn’t really plan it, it started accidentally and became a choice. Nor do I plan to return to those habits. But, looking back, I will say that it defamiliarized my society for me in a way that was basically healthy, and from which I still benefit.

It started at the tail-end of middle school. I had struggled with my weight for all four of those years, which are right up there with high school as “worse four years in which to struggle with your weight,” at least if we’re thinking about psychological consequences rather than actual physical longevity. The reasons for this were straightforward: I liked watching TV better than I liked going outside. When I went outside, I almost always ran into someone who wanted to yell insults at me or shove me toward the ground or something. No fun. Somewhere around sixth grade, out of concern about what my fatness was doing to my long-term girl-kissing options, I started exercising, but I didn’t know what I was doing and so it didn’t make much of a dent. Then someone told me that if I ran around the block four times, it would add up to a mile. I started jog-walking around the block once or twice a day, and within a year or so, this had become daily three-milers and then five-milers. Once you can, on your own steam, move far enough away from your own house that the outdoors become interesting and unfamiliar again, you don’t mind the outdoors so much. I learned things about my surroundings. One day I found, judging by the signs posted on the wire fence, our local Superfund site, which, say what you will, that’s interesting. More importantly, I discovered that I could set goals and then, subsequently, with patient effort, achieve them, which was something that till then I had thought was only true about other people.

Naturally, this ate away at my sitting-indoors time. I lost the plot threads of whatever sitcoms or cartoons I had used to keep up with. I forgot what had been happening on Star Trek: The Next Generation. With the irritability of youth, I started to associate all that with the trapped and depressed person I had been a year or so before. (I was still a trapped and depressed person, but less so.) I decided to see how long I could go without sitting in front of a television, and was surprised how easy it was. Then it was time for high school, I was on the cross-country team (which ate up a lot of time) and then the forensics and Quiz Bowl teams, and when my new habits had finished setting in place, there just wasn’t any room for any leisure activity except listening to bands and reading about those bands and learning about other bands that had influenced them. There were so many bands!