Television Required
August 31st, 2007In 1970, my parents got their first television. I was four years old and I remember coming in for dinner after being outside playing with my friends and there it was, a huge black and white television sitting right in our living room. My mother talks about how I ran into the door frame as I went toward the bathroom to wash up for dinner. I was so engulfed by this new television that now had a dominating presence in our home.
Television has come a long way since then. Now we can watch television on large plasma LCD screens with high definition (HDTV) signals and digital cable. But is it really a requirement? I don’t like most television programming but I do use it to watch either a DVD or a VHS tape of movies or old shows that I do enjoy.
Some people I know truly believe it is a requirement of life. An acquaintance of mine was once telling me how frustrated he was that he could not find the time to start his own business. From many conversations with him I knew that he did have an idea of a business strategy and that he had agonized over this for a long time. I told him to take baby steps, to just go ahead and incorporate his business and start asking around to get his first consulting client. As we sat there in front of his television, he told me he didn’t have the two hundred dollars to incorporate. Yet I knew from previous conversations that he was paying over a hundred dollars a month for cable television programming. And I knew since he was single with no children and very rarely went out with friends that he was watching over five hours of television a day.