Social experiments (AKA, why we cut out TV for a year)

Mr. Cents and I decided to give up TV, in-home movies and video games (mostly just affecting him) this year. When we tell people this, we get a mixture of responses, usually stated in some tone of horror. Really, it’s not so terrifying - honest.

Because Mr. Cents loves efficiency, I came up with a short list of answers to our most frequently asked questions:

Is this a New Year’s Resolution?
Not exactly. Typically, when someone starts a New Year’s Resolution they expect to go on a lifelong journey of giving up or incorporating some type of behavior. For example, one common resolution is losing weight. No one says, “This year I’m committed to losing 10 pounds! And then next year I’m going to gain it all back starting January 1st!”

Mr. Cents likes to call our TV avoidance a “social experiment” rather than a resolution. The basis of the experiment was to find out how much TV actually permeates our lives. When Mr. Cents quit smoking two years ago he discovered that the only way to know how much something affects you is to completely remove it from your life for an extended period of time and then compare your life before and you life after. (he's an engineer so it always has to come down to some experiment or another)

If you don’t watch TV, what do you do?
It’s really enlightening to see how much time we wasted (yes, wasted) watching TV. We get so much more done with the extra couple hours (or more) a day. We socialize more, try new hobbies, contribute to volunteer organizations, and we even talk more to each other. Our quality of life is better because we have so much more time. The change in our lives has been significant.

Don’t you ever get bored?
Not really (well, sometimes). There have been a couple of evenings where we run out of things to do at home and felt the need to bundle up in the middle of a blizzard to go to a movie or dinner. All in all though, just like when you have extra money in your paycheck, you'll always find ways to spend it, we have always found ways to spend our extra time. In a nutshell, we’ve changed our habits. If you’re used to sitting in front of the TV for two hours a night, at first it is going to feel like you are missing something. Eventually, the mist clears and you find something else to do that feels as good as or better than watching TV mindlessly.

When the year is over, are you going to lock yourselves in for a month starting in January and watch TV constantly?
We could return to vegging out in front of the TV most weeknights but after nearly four months of doing without, I don’t think we will. One exception to our social experiment was that we would allow ourselves to watch TV when one or both of us are traveling. Because I’ve gotten so used to going without, I rarely turn on the TV when I’m alone in a hotel room or when Mr. Cents is out of town, even for background noise. There are just too many other things I’d rather be doing.

Are you saving money since you aren’t watching TV?
That’s debatable. Mr. Cents and I live in an area where DSL is not an option and we must therefore purchase high speed internet via the cable company. Having high speed internet without cable is not an option, so we still have super-basic cable (technical term of course) that we’ve had since before our experiment. No change in spending there.

Because we are more active, our budgeted money for going out has increased. Sure, we could look for cheaper means of entertainment, but we really want this year to be an exploration year and find new passions. Mr. Cents and I plan on taking lessons for racquetball and golf – neither of which qualifies as cheap entertainment, and certainly not as cheap as TV. We’ve mildly reduced our energy consumption by keeping the TV off, but any money from this is eaten up by dinners away from home, activities, or the cost of gas needed to take us out of the house.

One big impact cutting TV has on our bottom line is removing us from temptation. We’re not watching ads; we’re not comparing our living space to our TV “peers”. The logic behind retail marketing is to convince you to buy something you don’t really need, but by way of advertising you realize that it could, in fact, make your life better. Keeping out of big box stores reduces my urge to consume. So does turning off the TV.

According to Juliet Schor’s The Overspent American, even more damaging to your wallet than advertising is the impact of creating a new “reference group”. We start to identify with the actors in the shows we watch. By watching TV, we no longer want to keep up with the Jones next door; we now want to keep up with The Girls Next Door, to the impact of over $200 dollars an hour.

Trent over at The Simple Dollar posted last year about financial reasons behind giving up TV. The financial reasons were interesting, but what drew me more to the article was what to replace the time you have now that you’ve turned off your TV. Things like taking on a major project, going back to school, having more time for self reflection, and encouraging a budding hobby are many of the reasons Mr. Cents and I are loving life without TV. In the end, Trent summed up his post with a quote that sums up our feelings about our social experiment, one which is likely to encourage us to keep the TV turned off for much longer than we originally intended:

“In short, by cutting out television, you can not only directly save money, but live a much more rich and fulfilling life.”