What an sneaky evil little contraption the television is. You spend all this time and energy picking out just the right one, best picture quality, surround sound, big enough to broadcast scores at Yankee stadium, and then you spend all of your time watching it. You don't even notice the time passing. So basically its a giant time sucking distraction from real life, which of course is what we love about it. I'm a TV junkie, I'll be the first to admit it. We don't actually have a giant mega TV, but we do have a fairly large flat screen in the living room and we still have my old 13 inch purple polka dot CRT model from college in the bed room (hand painted by me). I guess we have never been as TV obsessed as a lot of the nation. Still, until recently the TV has been on from waking until sleep in our house. When we started looking at and striving for simple living this jumped out at us as a big big problem. We were two and a half people with with four TVs. Too much, too many. Still, we are not quite ready to give up television all together, so what to do?
First off, we easily and without hesitation got rid of the TVs in the kitchen and office. It's been about four months now and I don't miss them at all. Then, with quite a lot of hesitation, we TV addicts decided to get rid of cable, which surprisingly (to me at least) we don't miss either. We pay for Netflix and HuluPlus and that is more than enough entertainment. We were already also paying for Amazon prime for diapers and such so they have movies too. We also got a nifty little thing called a Roku that allows us to stream all of these plus Pandora (which I am coming to love) on our remaining TV.
Several added bonuses to this system, the box is only about two square inches so we got rid of the giant cable box as well,, almost no commercials, and we are saving about $60 a month. So, we still have TV but at least now we have to think about what we are watching and if the show goes off and no one is paying attention the screen just goes black. I suppose eventually we should get rid of the TV all together but this will do for now. Baby steps my friends, baby steps.
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