9-Mar-2020
To be honest, yours truly here is an average guy, living with many of the First World’s problems, that is also shared by millions and billions. The only difference is perhaps after looking into the mirror and finally seeing what a ‘loser’ he has become, that rude realisation has prompted him into a corrective mode, to arrest further downfall and spiral into the abyss.
The reality is, like many others, over the years yours truly has chosen comfort over things that he should have done. He really has no one else to blame but himself, as it was his choice to do things like watching TV/streaming, which seems quite harmless and even fun at the time. However, when you count up the hours upon hours and over the decades, its insidious nature has finally revealed itself. Put simply, for every hour that is spent watching TV, we remain static, whilst the world has moved on. Times that we could have put to better use by advancing ourselves, to make ourselves into something, is instead wasted and we are not getting those hours back.
There is a theory that it takes 10,000 hours to be a master of something. So say 3 hours a day, every day will get you to 1,000 hours. Over a decade (10 years), you get to be a master for having clocked in those practise/work.
Just look at some of the young sports stars, who started training as a young kid, comes onto the world stage with great skills when they are just teens, that’s because they have clocked 10,000 hours of practising. Sure, it takes more hours, deliberate training and among other things to be great but that 10,000 hours definite shows, as you can see from someone who is quite good compared to someone who is mediocre.
Now it can be argued perhaps you didn’t have the parents with the foresight to train you into something. Or that you weren’t lucky enough to come across many opportunities. Granted that is true but it still doesn’t negate the hours you wasted in childhood and adulthood. Just think back, did you spent every second making sure you are working towards a better future, like studying, training, practising etc? Yes no doubt you did some hours, but was it enough? I think for the vast majority, bar the exceptional few, a lot of time, measured in many hours every day have definitely been wasted.
Our excuses might have been that we needed TV/streaming for a bit of down time, to relax and recover from our hard days at the school/office. Or that we are actually learning something from our devices. The truth is, TV is an escape and rather than dealing with our harsh realities, we chose to momentarily forget all our problems. Not surprisingly, our problems remain and so here we are again and again.
Another problem is of course, we are not unique in being the master of TV watching. There are plenty of people who also have mastered 10,000 hours, 20 thousand, 30 thousand hours and so forth. Sadly, this TV watching skill is so common and with not much commercial value, one doesn’t or can’t make much money from it. Alux [1] said it best in one of their videos – rich people get on TV whilst poor people watch TV.
Look, the point is that a little TV is ok and even useful/educational but we watch far from little. In fact, it was said that the average American watches 4-5 hours of TV (videos) a day. And one can argue that other developed countries share the same pattern. Also, this figure does not include other interactive device times like chatting with friends or playing games. In short, besides school or work, pretty much every spare minute is spent on leisure and whilst you are gaining short term pleasure, make no mistake that it is being paid for by long term (future) pain.
So it really comes down to a choice, if you want your success being measured by how cool you are because you have seen the latest series of this or that, then that’s fine and you should be happy for having been able to achieve what you wanted. However, if you want to be rich and/or to get ahead in life, then you will need to make a hard choice, to forgo some (if not most) of that TV time and instead do something useful.
Like many other additions, we have built our lives around TV/video and it won’t be easy to let go. So we will need to be strong, strong enough to want that other (success) goals more. Unless we want that other goals bad enough, sadly our TV habit will stay and we are forever condemning ourselves to be future losers with lifelong regrets.
So what’s it going to be? Master of TV Watching or Master of Your Own Destiny?
[1] not an affiliate – but check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nllZrOoxpzc
Struggle Perpetual 