What should I do with all my TV time?

Matt Pearl

The other day, my wife and I were discussing the future of our television programming consumption.

It’s a dilemma that so many of us face: should we pay for TV, or should we put up an antenna, roll the dice and hope for enough good programming that dropping the satellite (and accompanying bill) seems like a good choice?

My reluctance comes from losing sports broadcasts on cable/satellite networks.

I don’t watch a ton of sports, believe it or not, but when fall Saturdays roll around, I have college football games that I don’t want to miss.

My wife has cable shows she watches, too, but is less adamant about keeping them accessible.

I know that personal finance guru Dave Ramsey would tell me to stop paying for it and put the difference toward reducing debt.

I can just hear Suze Orman asking, “What’s the problem? Cut the bill.” If only it were that easy.

This must be quite an age of indulgence for folks like me to agonize over whether we should reduce household spending on TV. For most of the history of man, a significant portion of household income and resources have good toward just getting everyone fed and keeping a roof overhead.

I realized the other day that I was not subscribed to the SEC Network, and I therefore missed the Missouri game against Kentucky.

At the time, I was pretty upset. In retrospect, it’s probably better that I was not able to watch such a debacle.

Anyhow, I have always heard that if you want to break a bad habit, you must replace it with a good one.

In this scenario, we’ll call over dependence upon pay television to be my bad habit, and since many of those channels won’t be replaced in my anticipated switch to free TV, I’ve been thinking about what good habit I should pick up to replace time spent in from of the tube.

There was a time when I was consuming books pretty quickly, often several a week. That might be a nice, mind-expanding practice to which I could return.

And after I have read more, I could start writing more — writing this column and Straight Talk for the Albany Ledger are my favorite professional duties of the week.

I suppose I could grab onto a hobby, like building model cars, trucks, and planes. Or I could exercise.

I could ride my bike in the nice months and run on the treadmill during the cold ones.

There’s always a honey do list waiting on the counter or refrigerator for me. I probably should get around to some of those one day.

Imagine the positive improvements I could make in my life if I were just to go ahead and detach myself from that television set.

Think of how much of a jump I could get on my work, how much more time I could spend with my family — the meaningful kind, not the type where we’re all sitting in the living room, each of us hypnotized by the same TV show.

When I read myself writing the argument, I’m all in, but when I pick up the phone to call and cancel my service, well, that’s a little different.

But I’m pretty confident that some day soon I’ll get my priorities straightened out.

But now, if you’ll excuse me, I have hours worth of binge watching to do to catch up on my DVR recordings.