I do not watch TV. Other than using it as a means to watch films, the hulking screen is useless to me. It is not necessarily that I think that everything shown on it is misinformed or coated in brainwashing propaganda. The base for my resistant to it is my time. My time is precious to me, and although I waste many hours of it staring at walls or feeling bad for myself or pretending to sleep, I just cannot bring myself to sit down and watch a television series. After a few minutes the guilt kicks in, and I feel a massive wave of fidgety anxiety. "You should be spending your youth doing something productive, like writing symphonies or novels" whispers my conscience.
When I am sitting in front of my couch, blank stare lit up by the flashing screen, I can't help but feel hollow. I imagine driving down a street, somewhere in the suburbs, and seeing the slivers of plasma screen, ubiquity slicing through family room blinds. To my left and to my right, the same. And these people sitting still are all thinking the same thing, or rather, letting the tv think it for them. And they hollow themselves out.
I am probably exaggerating the egregious nature of this most popular pastime. But I can't help but regret that we let this manufactured plasma subvert each of our unique minds, for just a few hours, to "relax". In the same way that I feel (maybe unfairly) that anti-depressants are "cheating", I possess an amount of contempt for this means of escape. By cheating, I mean escaping one's emotions. Becoming blind. Becoming numb. This scares me, and the same way I, ignoring the advice of those concerned, turned down the anti-depressants, I must uphold my values and deny the television my own mind to deluge.
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