Why I Got Rid of My TV

Up until about a year or so ago I was a night owl burning the midnight oil every night. Simply put the internet would not let me sleep.  My regular sleeping cycle would top out at about 2am, only to wake up sometime in the afternoon, (the life of an unemployed slacker, I promise you I’m working on it). My mind would go into fifth gear and race constantly from page to page, and article to article, and this was before I discovered YouTube! I would listen to music and read articles on everything from global warming to why do I have this dot on my hand? Is it cancer? Oh my god It’s cancer! I wasn’t alone though, I found that most of my peer group were night owls, posting to every social media outlet, every hour on the hour about how “bored” they were. We literally have access to just about any piece of information that you can imagine, you can learn just about anything online, and be entertained by thousands of cat videos, but yet everyone is still… bored. Including me. I was never a good student, and I ironically LOVED to read and learn, but I just didn’t like the assignments. I would read every book, but skip the book report. I would research every project but skip doing the project, it drove my mother nuts! Getting back to the millennials and the night owls, so many of us would stay up all night burning our retinas on computer, TV, and smartphone screens complaining about how bored we were, and all of us had one glaring thing in common. Procrastination! You know the ol’ “say” but not “do”. The ol’ “wish” but not “work”. We all had this and I was the worse one. I used to procrastinate about procrastinating! Traditional education might not be for everyone but there are still alternative routes to become informed and well rounded. Once I got deep into YouTube (and I mean full blown obsession mode), I found that there was way too much content out there for one mind to handle. Technology isn’t our enemy, just like any other “vice” it’s all about moderation. I took a step back and actively began to access the distractions in my life because some are good, and most are bad and I loved YouTube. I can honestly say that I’ve learned more from YouTube than all four years of high school, and with that being said I still had too much unneeded stimuli in my room. I took a necessity attendance. A rundown of all my devices, and their level of importance. Laptop is a must. PlayStation isn’t a must, but I still actively interact with it, and enjoy playing it from time to time. Headphones are a must as music is my life blood. Then I came around to my television. A 47” LG smart HDTV that stayed on. It never got turned off, in fact it was on just as I was pondering its place in my life. But why did I have it? I never watched TV. At night I kept it on, but dim because I was holding on to some childhood phobia of the dark, and during the day it was just… on. If anything, it was more of an object that supplied background noise because it felt strange to have a completely quiet room. Why did I have this TV? I didn’t need it, and I felt like it was keeping me shackled to my comfort zone (dramatic enough for you?). I sold it that day for $100. Ever since then I choose my distractions wisely, and began to K.O. around 9pm, and waking up at around 5am. I found that I used to desire to want to “kill” time, when (*cliché tagline incoming*) I got so much more out of life when I began to seize the day, and not waste it.