Most people don’t believe me when I tell them that I don’t watch TV. Their jaws drop to the floor and their brains start oozing out of their ears when they find out that not only do I not watch TV, but I don’t even own one.

“But – but – but then.. what do you do?” is a common response once they have recovered from the initial shock of finding out that there is a person out there who doesn’t spend his time staring mindlessly at the colorful picture box.

Most people can’t wrap their heads around the fact that I don’t watch TV. It’s completely stunning to them and they never believe me at first. It’s like when I say that I don’t watch television it goes in one ear and out the other. They will bring up things they saw on the TV, a program, a commercial, or whatever, and they’ll try to have a conversation with me about it.

“Hey did you see that commercial with that guy who did that thing and that other thing happened and then they all took that medicine and felt better?”
“No, that must be from TV because I have no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t watch TV.”
“But you must have seen that one. Don’t you remember when the thing and the other thing..”
“No, I said I don’t watch TV. That means I don’t see commercials.”
Once this has happened a few times it suddenly hits them and they are like “Wow, you really don’t know what that is? You seriously don’t watch TV at all?”

The average TV junkie will then ask me why I don’t watch TV, and what else I could possibly do instead. It seems silly to me to ask what I do instead of watching TV. Umm, well, I do other things. Instead of tuning out reality and turning my brain off to stare at pretty pictures that somebody else has put on a screen I choose to do other stuff. I would rather do almost anything than watch TV. TV is not even a last resort for me since I don’t even own one.

The average person spends about 15 years of their life watching the tube. Thats more than 131,000 hours staring at a screen with your brain turned off, absorbing what some giant corporation wants you to see. Imagine if you spent even half of that time doing anything else. Imagine how good you could be at playing the guitar if you spent 131,000 hours practicing? How great of shape would you be in if you put 131,000 hours into exercising? How many books do you think you could read in 131,000 hours? Do you think TV has done anything for you except turn your brain into mush? I certainly don’t think so. Sure there are some semi-informative documentaries or programs on once in a while, but for the most part it’s all junk! It’s advertisements, filler, propaganda, and fear. Why would I want to spend even a little bit of time turning my brain into shit? I don’t. That’s why I don’t watch television.

If there is something that was on TV that I’d like to see, I google it and watch it on my own time while cutting out all the garbage adverts and filler. Most people turn on the TV to see what’s on. Then they constantly complain – “there’s nothing on TV tonight.” If there’s nothing on TV, then why sit there flipping through the channels until you find something that you don’t actually want to watch? Many people will eventually settle for some crap they don’t even want to see but will sit there watching it anyway. Why? That seems incredibly stupid to me.

When you sit down to watch TV it takes less than one minute before you enter a trance-like state similar to the state you go into when you are being hypnotized. If you think this is far out, exaggerated, or false information, think again. While watching TV your brainwaves go to what’s called ‘low-alpha’ waves. This is a frequency range between 8 and 12Hz. This brainwave frequency is associated with suggestibility (hypnosis and mind control) and deep meditative states. When in this state you absorb what the screen plays for you into your deep subconscious mind and it can influence you later on without you even knowing that it’s doing so!

When watching television, your thoughts are not your own. Everything you think about while watching has been planted into your brain by somebody else. You don’t have to think to watch TV, and if you do you’re thinking about some fake television program, not realistic situations. You begin to think like the tube, you begin to act like the tube. You dress like it and eat like it, you raise your children the way it does. The tube controls the minds of those who spend countless hours trading their own thoughts for someone else’s idea of how reality should be.

Do you really want the big corporations planting thoughts into your head for 131,000 hours of your life? If you do then all the power to you, but that kind of life is not for me. There are too many other things to do than sit around letting people like Rupert Murdoch program my thoughts.

Did you know that television stations are owned by a relatively few people, and they ultimately decide what you see on their stations and read in their newspapers?

In 2002 the biggest US media giant, AOL-Time Warner owned:

Cable and Satellite TV: HBO, America’s largest pay-TV cable network with secen US and six international divisions, Cinemax, Time Warner Sports, CNN (10 divisions worldwide), Time Warner Cable, Road Runner, Time Warner Communications (primarily a telephone service), New York City Cable Group, New York 1, devoted exclusively to news in the New York City area, Time Warner Home Theater, Time Warner Security (video monitoring), Court-TV (ownership shared with Liberty Media), Comedy Central (ownership shared with Viacom) and Kablevision (Hungary).

Television and Movie Companies: Warner Brothers, WB Studios, WB Television, Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, Telepictures Production, Witt-Thomas Productions, Castle Rock Entertainment, Warner Home Video, WB Domestic Pay-TV, WB Domestic TV Distribution, WB International TV Distibution, The Warner Channel (separate companies for Latin America, Asia-Pacific, Australia, and Germany), and WB International Theaters in 12 countries.

Publishing: Time-Life International Books, Time-Life Education, Time-Life Music, Time-Life AudioBooks, Book-of-the-month Club, Paperback Book Club, History Book Club, Money Book Club, HomeStyle Books, Crafter’s Choice, One Spirit, Little Brown, Bullfinch Press, Back Bay Books, Warner Books, Warner Vision, The Mysterious Press, Warner Aspect; Warner Treasures, Oxmoor House, Leisure Arts, Sunset Books and TW Kids.

Magazines: Time, Time Asia, Time Atlantic, Time Canada, Time Latin America, Time South Pacific, Time Money, Time For Kids, Fortune, Life, Sports Illustrated, SI Women/Sport , SI International, SI For Kids, Inside Stuff, Money, Your Company, Your Weekly, EW Metro, The Ticket, In Style, Southern Living, Progressive Farmer, Southern Accents, Cooking Light, Travel Leisure, Food & Wine, Departures, SkyGuide, Vertigo, Paradox, Milestone, Mad Magazine, Parenting, Baby Talk, Baby on the Way, This Old House, Sunset, Sunset Garden Guide, Health, Hippocrates, Costal Living, Weight Watchers, Real Simple, President (Japan), and Dancyu (Japan), plus 80 other magazines in Britain.

Record Labels: Atlantic Group, Atlantic Classics, Atlantic Jazz, Atlantic Nashville, Atlantic Theater, Big Beat, Background, Breaking, Curb, Igloo, Lava, Mesa/BlueMoon, Modern, Rhino Records, Elektra, EastWest, Asylum, Elektra/Sire, Warner Brothers Records, Warner Nashville, Warner Alliance, Warner Resound, Warner Sunset, Reprise, Reprise Nashville, American Recordings, Giant, Maverick, Revolution, Qwest, Warner Music International, WEA Telegram, East West ZTT, Coalition, CGD East West, China, Continental, DRO East West, Erato, Frazer, Finlandia, MCM, Nonesuch, and Teldec.

Internet: the web giant America Online (AOL)

AOL-Time Warner’s competitors are Disney, Viacom, Vivendi Universal and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Between that group of companies they basically control everything you see on TV and in the mainstream media. Do you really trust these corporations to have your best interest in mind or do you think that maybe they want to sell you something? Maybe they want to sell you a lot of things.

Some people say “Spending your time on the internet isn’t any different than watching TV, so what’s your problem Mitch?”

Actually, spending time on the internet is much different than watching TV.

First of all - you don’t go into a trance if you’re using the internet properly. When using the internet you do not switch to low alpha brainwave patterns. You are interacting with it and deciding what to do, what to read, and where to go. Not that alpha brainwaves are bad, they can be very useful for meditative practices and for other reasons, but I don’t think that the television corporations have your best interest in mind while hypnotizing you. They know the power of suggestibility in these trance states and you better believe they are going to take advantage of it. 
Second – For now, the internet is still open for most of us to share almost anything we want without much censorship. On TV, everything is censored. Everything has been approved by someone who doesn’t want to lose their job right up the chain of command in these companies into the very top. On the television you’re given the illusion of having some sort of choice when you choose which station to tune into, but only a small handful of super-rich elite own everything that you see on TV. If they want you to see it, you see it, not the other way around. How do you think they got so rich? By telling you what to do, how to act, and what to buy through television suggestion and hypnosis, that’s how they got so rich. 
Third - Using the internet makes you smarter, not dumber. How many ebooks have you read on TV? Have you even ever read a full screen of words on a television? Not likely. . that would be too much brain activity for TV!

Try giving up watching TV for 30 days. I dare you to find something else to do with all that extra time. Perhaps you could even start a blog or find time to do something productive. Maybe you could even squeeze in a few sit ups with all that extra time, eh? You chubby TV junkie you!