My Year Without Television: Part Two

Putting the television in the garage has caused a change in how we run our family. We were not avid TV watchers before this. The boys watched PBS in the morning, and Kara and I watched 24 one night, and PBS’s cooking shows Saturday morning.

So what do we do to fill the time that we used to use television for? I get asked the question much when people hear that we have no television, “Well, what do you do then?”

I have found that the people who ask a question like this are the ones who should probably look into an addict program. If you have no idea what to do with yourself without something, it is usually called an addiction. Dictionary.com defines addiction as: the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming.

If you are lost and confused and go into withdrawal symptoms without the stimuli of something, that something is an addiction. Father Rolheiser says in his book Holy Longing, “We are entertaining ourselves to death.” It is true. When I hear a statistic like: 20% of an average American’s life is spent in front of the television, that scares me. There is too much to do, too many people who need connection and community, and too much work for the kingdom of God to accomplish to simply sit and stare at a box and be entertained for one fifth of your life.

Father Rolheiser also says in the same book, that we are the first culture who does not have to ask the tough questions in life, because we have enough to entertain us and occupy us until we die. That scares me too. The truth behind this statement is that we are shaping a culture with no depth.

I am NOT saying that all people with a television are hollow shallow people. What I am saying is that people who are addicted to television have the same INTERNAL issues as someone addicted to other forms of stimuli. We use it as an escape, a comfort, and a crutch. We get to pretend that we are not the bored, lonely, workaholic people that we are. We get to live out vicariously through our favorite television show what we wish was true in our own life.

What I am saying with this is that some movies and television shows can really inspire us to be better, that is the power of a story. But when we refuse to take the inspiration of that story and deposit what we have received into some adventure that God has for us, and we just redeposit it back into another show or movie, we get caught into an addiction cycle. This is where many people of our day get caught.

TV is good for communicating story and inspiring us to do something with our life. That is the power of story. God uses story to inspire us. But we have to do something with that. We have to give that inspiration a direction other than back into another story to entertain and occupy us.