From the title of this article I suppose you are thinking – “wow, this really together and sustainable lifestyle type guy is going to share with us what it is like to voluntarily give up both the internet AND TV!”. Unfortunately everything in the above phrase is true if you leave out the word “voluntary”. We didn’t give it up voluntarily we had it most callously ripped from our grasp by cruel fate; well that and some type of technical snafu.
I won’t bore you with the technical intricacies of why this happened (I don’t understand them anyway) or the hours of crying, screaming and begging I did over the phone to our heartless cable company to try and get it put back on (pretty much fruitlessly). What I will bore you with is the impact it had on our lives and how it changed the way we view the electronic media.
We all kid ourselves about one thing or another and mine has always been that both the TV and internet don’t mean much to me, I mean I’m a practicing Luddite (look it up) and while I allow them to be in the house to keep my lovely wife happy, they don’t mean much to me. I can give them up any time I want to, I JUST DON”T WANT TO! Yup, I’m addicted like everyone else. Here it is, almost a week and only now am I starting to get over the twitches and tics that are generally calmed when my brain receives its daily dose of electronic stimulation. Somewhere in this article is a photo of my face when I realised this outage wasn’t going to be resolved in a matter of minutes, not to say hours.
If I ignore the withdrawal symptoms that this little adventure has caused I can actually realise that there have been some very positive side effects on our lifestyle –
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More activity time for things such as gardening, walking and work on my projects – when I get home from work I like to decompress tootling about on the internet and while you can find some interesting stuff to read, it gets in the way of actually doing things. I realised this on an intellectual level but having it thrust into my face like this really brought the message home – “ get off the computer and get some stuff done!”.
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More Family Time – OK, I admit it, I never said I was perfect, but more often than not we will sit down to dinner in front of the TV. This pretty much kills conversation and gives you a focus other than the food you are eating and your wonderful significant other. We have now started eating at the dining room table (used mainly for special occasions, seed sowing and potting on in hot/cold weather or even the odd card game) and actually talking during the meal. That in itself has been worthwhile.
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More Reading Time – We tend to accumulate books at an alarming rate and the “to read” pile on my side of the bed is threatening to be an avalanche of wisdom that would cause bodily harm if it fell on me. There are lots of good books on sustainable living out there, my current read “Simple Prosperity – finding Real wealth in a sustainable Lifestyle” by Dave Wann, has been in my possession for over 12 months, waiting to be read. Getting my head away from a screen, of whatever type, gives me more reading time.
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Resource sharing – my local library has computers and internet access for a very reasonable fee (in fact this article was uploaded from one of the library’s computers). If we were to use these when we needed internet access it would make us much more mindful of what we were using them for and reduce the mindless browsing that we (or I) do. Just like putting your credit cards in an ice cream container full of water in the freezer, it makes you think before you use. It also reduces our need to own a computer.
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More Sleep – without the screens to stare vacuously at we tend to retire earlier to read in bed and then fall asleep earlier so on balance we are also getting more sleep.
We are still without internet and TV at this stage, but I know they will be returned to us within the next week or so, so will we be making any changes as a result of this little adventure? I am not sure but one thing we have agreed is to have at least one technology free day/night per week where the TV and internet are left off VOLUNTARILY, so that we don’t get sucked in. That should give us more time to cram in a bit more life, rather than just staring passively at a screen.
