Reply #17: TV-free for a few years now.

[Dora]

I've given up TV twice - once by choice, and once by circumstance. We've now been tvless for 3+ years.

I first gave up tv in '00 because of my uncontrollable viewing habits: six hours a day, minimum, and I didn't have cable. When I gave it up I experienced some pretty strong anxiety, I kid you not. I picked up crochet, read a lot more, washed my dishes each night instead of letting them stack up. My apartment was much cleaner. The anxiety stopped after a couple of weeks.

I began watching it again when I moved in with my husband before our wedding. I quickly stepped into my old habits: watching garbage late at night, wasting weekends on stupid movie reruns. Fortunately we were burglarized just a few months later, and the tv was lost, never to be replaced.

We love how much simpler our lives feel without television. Freeing ourselves from the bombardment of tv advertising has reduced our want level considerably. We both report high satisfaction with our home life without tv. We feel less stress, less malaise. If our house is noisy, it's with music and voices and laughter, not television chatter.

It's a peculiar path though. Our friends think we're kooks. We can rent movies on DVD and watch them on our computer if we're compelled to. We get a newspaper, and we listen to the radio, and we use the internet. After these three years without tv, I am now completely out of the mainstream culture loop - celebrity gossip and movies bypass me completely. I don't miss it, though.

No, I don't miss it. Not for a minute.