A Television Decision

My wife and I made the leap today: We took our fancy DVR cable box back to the Time Warner Cable office here in Durham and pulled the plug on our television lives.

No more TV. No cable. And with the death of analog TV just around the corner, no networks either.

Why did we do this?

We didn't watch a whole lot of television. But we did like our Daily Show and Colbert Report. And there were a few series we liked to follow as well (Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Scrubs). In the end, we thought we were giving too much of our lives to the idiot box and spending too much money doing it.

Sure, after a long and demanding day, it is sometimes nice to switch off your brain and lose yourself in a great show. But life's too short. There are too many great books to read, too many wonderful conversations to have, and too many great walks to go on. In the end, I bet no one looks back on his life from the Pearly Gates and says, "You know, I wish I had watched more TV." But I'm sure plenty of people wish they had experienced a little more of what life has to offer.

And besides, there's always the Internet.

[Update: On February 6th, CNN.com posted this fascinating article on the number of people who are getting their television content on the Internet. It's not hard to imagine a time when television as we know it will be a thing of the past, in the same way cell phones are steadily pushing landlines off the scene. Now if we can just figure out how to keep the Internet from taking over our lives in the same way TV does!]