My wife and I are fans of American Idol. We began watching in season 3, and we continued watching through season 4. However, we missed season 5 because in October 2005, we unplugged our TV.
We realized that TV was quickly becoming the focus of our lives and that we were border-line addicted to TV. Strike that. We were addicted. I once estimated that our total TV viewing time was somewhere around 8 to 12 hours on any given day. It started with having one or two shows that we liked being separated by an hour. Instead of turning off the TV for that hour, we’d watch it. And then we’d turn the TV on an hour before our shows and leave it on an hour after. Then two hours. It quickly progressed from there to a full addiction. With a young child, we wanted to break that habit early, so we turned the TV off. At one point, we went so far as to not even have basic television available. When we replaced our roof, the workers damaged the antenna. We told them to leave it, and we never fixed it.
Since October 2005, the TV has only been on three times: once for the 2006 Olympics, once for the 2006 BYU vs. U of U football game, and one more time for the 2006 BCS Championship football game.
All that changed when we rented our basement out.
We figured that TV was a standard part of any rental agreement, so we purchased a cable plan. Since then, we’ve been sorely tempted. We gave in last night by watching the second day of American Idol, season 6.
So does that mean that the era of not watching TV is passed? I don’t know. I guess we’ll see. I will say that at first it felt like drinking from the deepest, coolest well after being thirsty for a long time, but I’ll also say that I walked away from it with a neutral feeling. I wasn’t necessarily thirsty for more, but I also didn’t feel satisfied. We even turned it off halfway through because we wanted to do something else.
We did enjoy American Idol though.
