Wasting time in front of the television is almost a national pastime right now. The Nielsen Company has done some research and they report that an average person in the United States watches the equivalent of nearly 5 hours of TV per day. Obviously those numbers are just averages, so some people will watch a lot more and others a lot less, but it is still scary to think how much of our lives we waste in front of the TV.
I think it is the fact that LCD TVs flooded the market and drove prices down while taking up much less space that has driven the viewing figures up. Before the came onto the market a television was a huge, unwieldy and expensive item. No longer do kids have to put up with what their parents are watching in the living room, instead they all have their own TVs and can watch whatever they like. There is also a lot of snobbery about the size of your TV now because of all the larger sizes that have come onto the market. While a 32 LCD TV was good enough and a 42 inch TV used to be the pinnacle of entertainment then now if it is less than 50 inches in size then it is considered small.
I believe that our increased TV viewing habits are partly responsible for the massive obesity epidemic that is sweeping the Western world right now, that plus the low cost and ease of purchasing food which is high in calories and low in nutrients. But what can you do instead of watching all that TV?
A simple thing that you can do is to try out some new hobbies until you find one that you like. Everybody should be able to find a hobby they enjoy because there are so many different ones out there now that you can try out, even if not all of them get you doing anything more active than you would be doing watching TV. Even if you avoid the more exotic hobbies and go for something like collecting stuff instead then it is still very rewarding. A lot of people right now will be using the excuse that they don’t have enough time to take up a new hobby and get any good at it, but if you have enough time to watch 5 hours of TV per day then you have enough free time for this. With that kind of time free each week then the world is your oyster and you could do anything from learning to speak a foreign language to even learning an instrument you have always wanted to.
Or another option would be to go back to school. That’s right, if you fancy a change of career or just want to try and get promoted then you could use all that extra free time you have to take some courses and get better qualifications. If you hate the idea of actually attending classes then you can’t use that as an excuse to get out of it, you can do courses through distance learning now instead. So there is no excuse to sit there and waste your nights now, and even if the average person cuts their TV watching in half then they will still get a few to watch a few hours per night to keep up with their favorite shows!