The Town Herald

The netpaper about Elftowners, by Elftowners, for Elftowners.

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I Don’t Like Television Much

Opinion By: [Dil*]

I don’t like television much. Sometimes, I downright hate it. I’ve basically stopped watching all television. I don’t follow any shows or anything, but sometimes I catch myself watching it if my family has it on and I happen to have a little free time. I find most shows on television to be just terrible, plot less, and pointless. Sure there’s the rare good channel for learning like Discovery, History or sometimes Space, but the bulk of television is utterly useless. I also dislike advertisements; did you know that companies hire psychologists to help them with their ad campaigns? They’re messing with our minds and apparently they’re succeeding. We live in a consumer society.

It’s hard to single out the aspect I despise the most, but I’ll start with: reality shows. I’m sure we’ve all been sucked into watching one or two of these awful, awful reality shows. It’s all a bunch of made up garbage to entice the ugly person inside us all. The thing inside yearning to say, “Oh she’s too ugly to win that beauty pageant”, or “What an idiot, I could have even answered that question.” It’s a cheap way to boost one’s self-esteem watching other people demean themselves in such a way. To sum it all up in one sentence: people make assholes out of themselves on television to try to make obscene amounts of money. That’s all there is to it and boy is it a waste of time.

Sports are good for one’s health, mental and physical, but what does watching sports have to do with anything? In my opinion, it’s horribly dull and pointless. As a Canadian, a lot of my peers would mob lynch me if they knew I hated watching any sport, even hockey. No wonder we’re getting so fat, instead of playing sports, we sit at home in a lazy heap and just watch it. I regret every minute I have wasted in my life watching sports.

Television is a waste of our time. It’s crazy the amount of time we spend in front of that useless box, we don’t usually learn anything worthwhile either. It’s the laziest thing you can do. Shut the body and the brain down, no effort required. When I sit in front of the T.V. my brain goes into stall mode and all brain activity ceases. Now I think about people who park themselves in front of it for hours upon hours a day. “The average American household TV set is on for over 7 hours a day.” I hate to even imagine that, it’s atrocious. The average American adult spends 4 hours a day watching T.V. What a waste of life and apparently it shortens our lives too. Instead of exercising, or doing jack-shit, we just sit in front of this box and whittle our time away. 

So far, this machine has made us stupid and fat. Great innovation. The statistics are alarming as well. “The average child spends more time watching TV than in school. On average, kids spend about 20 or more hours each week watching TV, which is more time than is spent in any other activity besides sleeping. An average person will have watched 7-10 years worth of television by age 70.” Seven years, that’d be one tenth of someone’s life. I refuse to let the box suck away my life like that.

In conclusion, please take a second to think about better things to do with your free time. Maybe finish reading that book collecting dust in some corner, maybe spending more time outdoors. Yes, you know, the outside world, the stuff outside the house. Enjoy nature; actually play sports instead of just watching it. And also don’t forget to press that button, the one that says “off”.

A poem I wrote for the occasion:

Behold!

Behold thy wretched box!
Spewing ads of beauty and Botox.
How I loathe television.
Dimming the mind; blurring our vision.

Conform to the media!
Burn books and encyclopaedias,
“We don’t need them, books are useless.”
People are sheep, absolutely listless.

How I despise this machine.
Our mushy minds we gladly demean.
Might as well sell our minds to the devil,
Wallowing in the ignorance we revel. 

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