The Trouble with TV

[kimberlysteele]

Steve Cutts, Evolution

At nearly fifty years old, my life has been inundated with television since I began this incarnation.  My grandmother once told me that she got a TV early on (1950s era) and it attracted a fair-weather friend who came over only to watch soap operas.  She was one of the few people I remember who budgeted the amount of time the television was on.  My best friend's house was far different: they had cable TV in the early 80s.  Cable back then did not have commercials.  If regular TV was cocaine, cable was crack.  We watched countless R-rated movies without any form of adult supervision.  No wonder Generation X is so fond of its foul language and Facebook drama: our childhoods were chock full of both in the form of cable TV.  As a teenager, I began to be bored by most TV despite my entire family remaining addicted to it.  Despite my overall dissatisfaction and boredom with TV, my brother and I still fought to watch it when we went to our family vacation cottage as children, as if there wasn't an entire world waiting outside for us to break out of our trance and join it.

Approximately fifteen years ago, my salary class aspirations got flushed down the toilet when the company my husband worked for as a high level executive crumbled due to managerial infighting and incompetence.  My budget tightened like a noose as I scrambled to cut costs.  I played a constant game of Whack the Pop-Up Expense to fend off the forces that sought to consume the contents of my tiny, dwindling bank account.  One day the incredible noise of Duck Dynasty, a  reality TV show about a group of loud, redneck hunters emanated from the next room.  I strongly suggested to my husband that I wanted to get rid of our TV and its accompanying package of channels; he reluctantly agreed we could do without it.  We have never gone back, though this is mainly due to my status as the breadwinner of the house.  My husband likes TV a great deal more than I do and would most likely pay the hefty fees per month for a package of deluxe channels if he had the money to do it.  

The Astral and Etheric Poison Effects of TV

Consider a stereotype about the Boomer generation: the Boomer sits transfixed in front of the television most of his or her waking hours, slowly losing the ability to do anything except sit and watch.  The characters on TV become more real to him than his family.  There is more than a few grains of truth to the stereotype.

In Hubert Selby Jr.'s novel Requiem for a Dream, an elderly woman named Sarah Goldfarb retreats into television and diet pill addiction as her adult son and his friends retreat into their own parallel heroin addictions.  The genius of Requiem for a Dream is its brutal portrayal of Sarah's addiction, which is just as destructive and deadly as a descent into illegal drugs.  TV is designed to be addictive and the majority of American Boomers fell for it.  

On the astral plane, TV creates a mess of emotional manipulation mixed with addictive dependency.  The watcher’s best instincts of charity, love, friendliness, and bravery are turned against him as he becomes an inert captive, watching other people living a facsimile of the karmic lessons he should be out there having in real life.  Breaks in the monotony of programming are more potent and obvious brainwashing: commercials.  Again, we have an astral mess of being urged to eat “healthfully” yet being bombarded with images of processed convenience food.  Is it any surprise the TV-addicted Boomer has a refrigerator that resembles a small morgue with a smell to match?  Pre-packaged convenience foods seldom live up to their advertising. 

TV manipulates via mixed messages. The lovely, slim actors and actresses indulge in every vice yet remain beautiful and enviable. One moment, there is an ad or a product placement for convenience food. Thirty seconds later, there are two ads for the latest pharmaceutical drug to treat a disease caused by a sedentary lifestyle that involves eating lots of convenience food.

Good Cop, Bad Cop

Despite the proliferation of emotional puppeteering designed to engage do-goodnik instincts among sedentary watchers, TV is a bad influence. The worst kind of behavior is treated with reverence and fascination on TV regardless of the fictional or nonfictional nature of the program. Crime shows about cops who run around chasing murderers and rapists are thinly disguised profiteering off of the excitement created by evildoers.  Without evildoers, the chickenhawk planted firmly on the couch would have nobody to look down upon. Without the alcoholic celebrity stumbling from hook up to hook up on the reality show, the wannabe would have no darkness to use in order to compare and contrast her beige, corporation-enslaved life.

In Lionel Shriver's novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, a teenaged boy named Kevin goes on a massacre and slaughters other kids and teachers in his school.  When Kevin returns home, he murders everyone in his family except for his mother, forcing her to live down the shame of having a mass murderer for a son.  After Kevin goes to prison, he is interviewed by a media reporter.  Kevin remarks:

 

"All of you people watching out there, you're listening to what I say because I have something you don't: I got plot.  Bought and paid for.  That's what all you people want, and why you're sucking off me.  You want my plot.  I know how you feel, too, since hey, I used to feel the same way.  TV and video games and movies and computer screens... On April 8th, 1999, I jumped into the screen, I switched to watchee.  Ever since, I've known what my life is about.  I give good story.  It may have been kinda gory, but admit it, you all loved it.  You ate it up.  Nuts, I ought to be on some government payroll.  Without people like me, the whole country would jump off a bridge, 'cause the only thing on TV is some housewife on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? winning $64,000 for remembering the name of the president's dog."

 

The Feng Shui of the Black Box

The television is etheric poison.  Even when off, the TV is an ugly black box.  The only way it is ever going to blend into its surroundings is when it is either in a store full of other TVs or if it is hidden by the doors of an armoire as was fashionable in the 90s.  When it is on, it perpetuates a colorful and bombastic assault that destroys entire rooms with its etheric miasma.  If the average person could see the etheric plane, the television would look like a chemical spill vomiting its rainbow tinted poison in a toxic pool around itself.  The only true way of cleaning up the noxious spill of the TV is by getting rid of the device entirely. 

Video Games

Games or what used to be called video games are hideous astral plane polluters, replacing the normal functions of human imagination with caricatured worlds of television-like brainwashing. If you want to take a perfectly normal young man and turn him into a miserable, pale, flabby drudge who accomplishes no original works and never realizes his own unique potential, by all means introduce him to video game addiction. 

Video games are expensive.  The equipment and sheer computing power needed to use them cannot and will not exist in a world where server farms are no longer subsidized and where internet is expensive to the average person.  As in the case of the TV addict, we have an inert captive living vicariously through a fake, prefab set of characters.  Life lessons aren’t lived and learned; they are procrastinated and set aside for a “later” that will hopefully never arrive.  Once again, the television dominates the living space like a black hole, and instead of providing cooked food, heat, and warmth like the fireplaces of old, it is a cold electronic eye that watches and sucks the vitality of humans even while it is asleep. 

One of the reasons I chose not to have children in this incarnation was the influence of TV and games.  I was addicted to PacMan by the age of 10 and by TV and movies at the age of 18.  I was addicted despite knowing better and feeling in my gut that it was wrong to fritter away the hours in front of the barking, bleeping screen.  If I could not resist the pull of the electronic hypnotist, how on Earth would I keep my child from becoming an addict?  My hat is off to any parent nowadays who is able to sanely budget their child’s TV and game time.  I don’t think I could have pulled it off and that is why I decided not to do it.

The Rise of Influencers

The influence of TV has been supplanted by the rise of influencers, but this is not to say that influencer culture is any better than TV addiction. Influencing as a career offers far more than TV because unlike the world of Hollywood, there are no gatekeepers.  Though the Kardashian/Jenners and their ilk may be plagued with rumors about how they maintain their top dog status, top influencers do not need to be part of the alleged Satanic, supposedly fecalphiliac/infanticidal elite. All that is needed to get in to influencing is a mobile phone with a decent camera. Lovely young girls can stay far away from the neo-Harvey Weinsteins of the world and still make all the money. Like Kevin of We Need to Talk About Kevin, the influencer is not the watcher, she is the watchee.

The influencer is perfectly happy to leave the habits of her Boomer grandparents behind in order to embrace a new and equally fake set of images. Unlike the Boomer's worship of prettied-up celebrities, her altar is the digital mirror. Her own prettied-up, photo-edited, "improved" face and body becomes the standard by which all must be measured. The cadre of ghosts that haunt the aging Hollywood celeb become much more personal, and therein lies the rub.  Influencing takes a great deal of energy across the planes: like gaming, it only exists because of subsidized internet grids. Like a TV watching habit, it is a time suck extraordinaire to create the content and to whip the avatar into apparent good shape. Last but not least, there is the pouring of one's entire spirit into the avatar and the investment in its fake karma and destiny. But that's a topic for future conversation.

TV Isn't All Bad!

I am a visual learner and I owe much of my current knowledge directly to the television. Being a visual learner means that it often takes me three times as long to learn via written instruction as it does from watching a few boring, jerky images on a screen. I have learned countless skills from television: I remember Sesame Street helping me count, Schoolhouse Rock helping me understand the functions of government, heaven knows how many origami and cooking videos, and last night's tech guy video teaching me how to use Open Broadcasting Software (OBS). As I mentioned, I don't have TV, but I do have a computer screen that functions in much the same way.  

I use TV to learn but I also use it to relax. I am no stranger to movies and various series. I often watch them while I exercise on my stationary bike.  Right now, I am watching a sweet series from Japan called The Maikanai: Cooking for the Maiko House on Netflix. The show is a subtle education on what the daily lives of maiko (apprentice geisha) are like and since it is in Japanese, it is a good intro/review of Japanese language. It's also a straight up entertaining show. I am grateful for TV and much like any other pastime that can turn into a vice, I believe it is fine in moderation.

Humans are weird and we can turn anything into an addiction.  The moral of the story here, I think, is to recognize the good and the bad of the omnipresent screen and to do what little we can to amplify -- and be thankful for -- the good.

Comments

A question about the books mentioned ...

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Kimberly,

I enjoy your blog posts in general, and some in particular have been "God shots" for me (to use 12-Step-meeting parlance), allowing me to see myself without the addict blinders on, for example (but not exhaustive): "The Negative Side of Puer Aeternus" and "Toxic Masculinity." Today's blog post is definitely another case.

Unfortunately right now, I only have a mundane question to ask: How/where did you come to know "Requiem for a Dream" and "We Need to Talk About Kevin"? It's my understanding that these novels were made into movies, so did you hear about these novels after watching the movie version? If so, I should practice looking for the original source material whenever I hear a movie coming out ... Unfortunately I have been averse to movie-watching for a long while, so usually any new titles go right past me without a second thought :-(
But in case you have a great source for novel recommendations, I thought I'd ask :-)

It has recently occurred to me that I can't remember the last novel I read that was not assigned homework from school. Perhaps Socrates would lump books along with TV if he were alive today, but it might not be a coincidence that my time reading fiction has gone down along with my astral/etheric health.

Thanks!
Eugene

[(Anonymous)]

Your chosen image for this week is singularity horrific. Reminds me of the film Idiocracy, if you've ever seen it? (The big question I had with that film was who was behind the scenes propping up the system? Due to the level of stupidity, it should have collapsed centuries before due to lack of maintenance, or invasion by more competent warbands)

Interesting you mention We need to talk about Kevin as well - I've actually seen the film but not read the book, funnily enough, they left out that fun little speech of his you quote - I wonder why...? As I read it, I was also put in mind of the song Vicarious, by Tool: https://genius.com/Tool-vicarious-lyrics

I'm not a visual learner myself, and part of that is because I read remarkably fast. TV, and particularly youtube videos are so sloooow. Even when I did used to watch TV, it was always in the background, whilst doing something else like (ironically) playing video games, or when I was a child, building Lego. I know I've mentioned banishing several times before, but since I started that, I can't even watch 5 minutes of TV. I just cannot stay focused on it, I just keep thinking of more interesting/useful things I could be doing.

As for video games though - yeah, those were a hard addiction to kick when I deliberately tried to stop playing them back in 2018. I used to be what might be termed a 'completionist' - I had to 100% finish games, even if I didn't like them (might have just been a "getting my money's worth" thing). I try to play them now though, and it's like the spark has gone from them, I literally just cannot enjoy them any more - even the 'epic' ones like Skyrim, which I used to love. Astral issues aside, it's probably for the best anyway though, as all more modern video games have become either pay-to-win nightmares (see: any mobile games, anything made by EA), multiplayer hellscapes or indie shovelware that only about 5 people will ever play, but which win 8 baftas for having a gay trans female lead character, with a thinly-disguised parable storyline about refugees.
How and why are E-'sports' now a thing as well? (I maintain that if you can hold a pint whilst doing it, and/or hold a conversation, it's not a sport. And yes, I'm looking at you, too, pool and darts)

I actually even have a VR headset (bought in 2019, prior to banishing). It's semi-fun... for a bit... until your neck hurts... or the battery runs out... and provided you can quietly ignore the niggling feeling that it's reprogramming your brain... and persist with it long enough to break your motion sickness reflex... But the overwhelming feeling I got from it was malaise. You finish some 'play' time on it and feel depressed. It's really weird, must be something on the etheric level whereby it slightly sucks the life out of you (and I played it with Wifi off - gods only know what effects a microwave emitter an inch from your brain will have long term). I did used to use it for a pretty good boxing simulator game (which, despite being made by one guy in his spare time and which sells for about $10, is better than 90% of the other games on it) for a while, until old Marky Z decided to make everyone log in with his stupid site every time you switch it on. Yeah, no thanks.

Something to consider as well - all big-budget TV, movies, games and influencer vids are made by multiple people, to cater to certain demographics. In the same way that putting every child in the same class at school does not magically make the dumb kids smarter, that demographic will inevitably be set to the lowest common denominator (even if we are to disregard any malevolent intentions of dumbing down the populace). In addition, being made by multiple people, editors, etc the shows will be "designed by committee", which is a sure-fire way to get a compromise of a product which thrills no-one, but also offends no-one, regardless of its nominal shock factor.
(There is a parallel here with the bit in Faust, where he summons a demon, who explains that he is still in Hell, and never left - one sinks down to the level of TV)
Like the boxing simulator I mentioned above, videos, games, etc made by one or two dedicated people as a labour of love, tend to be much better, even if by their nature, they will not be to everyone's taste. A bit like books! Or songs. Or a painting. (And so on)

I listened to an interesting podcast the other day which said the average 'cut' on a TV show is only 4 seconds. So the scene completely changes every 4 seconds! And people's attention spans have reduced by 150% since the start of a study into it in 2011.

Mr. Crow

[k_a_nitz]

"Humans [...] can turn anything into an addiction."

I found the same thing with podcasts and blogs in the 2000s, and now with substacks (and always with books!).

With substacks I am going back to the practice of limiting myself to a set number and not subscribing unless I unsubscribe from another first. The key thing is managing what gets first priority on my time and pushing the addictive passive stuff down the list.

[heloise8]

Thank you so much for sharing your incite into TV. It's a good reminder of how addictive the black box can be.

Something that really helped me to have the TV on less was to carefully consider its placement. When I started to arrange the furniture so that the TV was not the central focus it was easier to keep it off. In my old apt we had two couches facing each other with the TV on a shelf to the side. Right now we have a couch facing a big window with the TV off in a corner. It's nicer to look at the birds outside.

[(Anonymous)]

I am 100% in agreement about television addiction. So many people I know live their lives addicted to the TV.

I am also trying to think through what EXACTLY it is about television that is so bad and so addictively destructive.

Over the course of my adult life, I've lived with and without a TV (the latter condition often shocking people), but when I have had a TV, it's always been in an armoire or otherwise tucked out of the way. At present I own a giant-screen TV (free from a relative, that's the size they gave me) that lives in a small upstairs room of my house, along with a couch that pulls out so the room doubles as the spare bedroom. The TV is used to watch the occasional movie or serial show, which are often on dvd and borrowed from the library or purchased at a yard sale. The TV is like any other device in the home....when we decide to watch a movie or an episode of something, we go into the TV room, turn the device on, watch the movie or the episode, then turn the device off. We don't "live with it", for lack of a better phrase. It's not on unless we've made the decision to go into that room, turn it on, and watch something, the same way the laundry machine isn't on unless I decided to go into the laundry room, turn it on, and run a load or two.

This is a very different way of treating the TV than I see in many other homes. In so many other homes (including my late parents') the TV is smack dab in the middle of the main living area, and appears to always or almost always be on. It doesn't seem to matter if someone is watching something specific or not - the default setting for life, so to speak, is living with the TV in the room and turned on most of the time.

I've known a few other people who can use TV the way you use your computer or I use that giant screen in the spare bedroom, but not many. Most people who don't have the TV on all the time are on their computers all the time, either doing the equivalent of watching TV or playing video games. (I don't even know where to start with video games; nothing about them has ever appealed to me, unless you count playing scrabble on my phone when stuck in a waiting room.)

Which is a long way of getting around to the point that I don't think it's TV - or at least not video based forms of entertainment or instruction - that are the problem in and of themselves. So what is the problem? Commercials are certainly part of it; after decades of having TV only in recorded form, with no commercials, I can honestly say that commercials distress me - something about the persuasion and manipulation feels very uncomfortable, and when I find myself stuck someplace with a TV with commercials I always want to flee. And of course, there is some really awful dreck on the TV, that people consume because "nothing else is on" (then why not turn it off??), and the TV "news" is horrid - possibly some of the worst mind-poison of all, because it's manipulation pretending to be objective and informative.

There is some good material in video form, whether it's an instructional video or a well-made movie or series, and I think it's possible to access and enjoy that material without becoming addicted to TV. The key word being "possible" - and I think the key question being, why are so many people unable to control their use of video-based forms on entertainment and communication?

I feel like there is something else going on here - something in the larger society that makes "living with" the TV, or living inside a video game, so alluring. But I'm not sure what it might be.

[(Anonymous)]

No argument from me about "TV bad".

No real argument from me over "Vidya bad" either. However, I have noticed over the years that it is the womenfolk that really seem to have an irrational hatred towards video games and the men (for the most part) who play them. As a holder of two X chromosomes, can you take a gander as to where that hatred comes from? It is truly puzzling to me.