“Are you kidding me? What’s wrong with you?”

I know what it is to have my peers question my sanity in not-so-subtle ways. To be looked down upon. To be mocked, judged, and ridiculed.

Confession: I don’t have a TV.

I’ve never seen Lost or Survivor or Heroes or Sex and the City. And though I’ve watched an occasional episode of The Simpsons and Friends, I can’t chose a favorite or spew out witty best-of-the-best quotes. I’m not up on my celeb gossip, don’t care who wore or won what at the Emmy’s, and was never sought out as a companion for pop-cultural dishing around the water cooler.

People always ask me why I don’t watch television, like I’m depriving myself of some important entitlement to raise money for a good cause or protest the corporatizing of American media. Truly, it’s more a matter of logistics than me being a counter-culture hippie (yes, I’ve been called that and worse!). We got rid of our old TV when we moved cross-country last year and just haven’t replaced it. I’ve gone through other TV-free periods in my life, too, and each time, I’ve come away better for the experience.

Why? It’s easy. I’d much rather read a book than watch a TV show.

Top 10 Reasons Books are Better than TV

1. Books don’t convince us to buy stuff we don’t need. I just returned home after spending 2 weeks with relatives who have multiple televisions, cable, and DVR. It was easy to get swept up in the current of American Idol, America’s Next Top Model, General Hospital, What Not to Wear. But each day, I had to fight the urge to run out and buy a bunch of random crap I don’t need, like new shoes that make me fly or body wash that electrifies my skin or a mop that enables babies to eat safely from the kitchen floor. Not only does TV make us want to buy new stuff, it also makes us feel like the stuff we already have isn’t good enough! Books don’t do that. No subliminal marketing messages live between the paragraphs of my favorite stories.
2. Books aren’t passive. True, reading a book doesn’t exactly get the heart rate up like running a marathon might, but it’s still an active activity. We’re engaged with something in our hands, eyes moving over words across the page, fingers turning pages, heart and mind connecting with and visualizing the characters in a way not possible with the glowing blue IV-drip of television.
3. Books make excellent travel companions. iPods aside, television doesn’t fit in my purse. We can’t set it on our laps during a plane or a car ride. We can’t lug it out onto the beach while we soak in the sun. And why would we want to, with the world of books at our sun-warmed fingertips?
4. Books don’t dictate cultural “standards” with irrefutable visual examples. Another downside to my recent TV bender — in addition to being overwhelmed with a sudden need to consume and acquire, I felt fat, financially unstable, ugly, and otherwise inadequate. According to TV standards, I don’t fit in, and chances are, neither do you. We don’t have the right clothes or hair or things or car or overall look. But when I read a book, such details are left to my imagination. Even when the author describes the scene, I’m still creating actual images in my mind, and I don’t create images that make me feel like less of a person.
5. Books don’t suffer from pop-cultural neutralizing. Ever notice how all of the characters on television start to look the same? To say the same things, drive the same cars, eat the same food? Flipping through the channels, sometimes it’s hard to tell one show from another, as nothing stands out as unique or special anymore. But books are always unique. Authors could be given the same plot outline and still come up with wildly different takes on each story. Books don’t blur together in my mind when I try to recall them later.
6. Books are great company. Unlike television, which many people leave on all the time for the “company” of background noise, books really are good company. I love to read when I’m alone, to connect with the characters and become part of their worlds. I love thinking about them after I’m done reading, too — about what they said and how they changed and what I learned through their story. I can’t do that with background noise.
7. Books take us to new worlds. Part of a book’s ability to transport us from our world to another lies in the creative abilities of the author as she forms and invents the worlds of her stories. The other part lies in our own imaginative powers, our abilities to actively visualize what the author describes on the page through the filters of our own unique and special experiences and lives. Television, on the other hand, sucks us into the same world, over and over and over. Tune in next week for… more of the same. Yawn!
8. Books don’t pull us into a black hole, unable to account for lost hours. People ask me how I find the time to read and to write. My answer is always the same: I don’t watch television. Often, they respond with, “I don’t watch that much TV, either. Only X, Y, and Z.” But X Y and Z adds up to an average of 151 hours a month for most American TV viewers, according to a recent Neisen study. That’s more than 5 hours every day. There goes all of that writing and reading time!
9. Books don’t have commercials. Commercials that interrupt our connection to characters and story. Commercials that not-so-gently remind us of all the things we “need,” act now, don’t delay, limited time only. Commercials that propagate wanton consumerism rather than creativity.
10. Books are the soul of humanity in written form. The world of books represents the collective conscious and unconscious struggles of human life, delving into the real and the unreal, yet always seeking truth. Always seeking to impart wisdom and learning, even through entertainment. While television seeks to divide us into haves and have nots, rich and poor, attractive and unattractive, books seek to unite us. To connect us to stories and to one another through our universal human experiences. Books, like eyes and art and music, are windows to the soul.

Giving up television has freed my time, my mind, my emotions, my sense of what’s important and real. And it’s enabled me to better connect to that universal human experience, through reading, creating, and living.

So from one “counter-culture hippie” to another, I challenge you to do it! To stop turning it on and start turning the pages. You might surprise yourself! Try it for at least a week or so. Even if you can’t shut it off completely, make the decision to take back an hour or two of your life each day and pick up a book instead.

If you’re willing to take the challenge, or if you’ve cut down on your viewing habits already, I’d love to hear about your experiences!

Sarah Ockler, Author of TWENTY BOY SUMMER

Related posts:

1. Connect with Sarah Ockler: How Diverse Is Your Bookshelf?
2. Connect with Sarah Ockler: Sex in YA — Rating the Writing
3. Connect with Sarah Ockler: National Writing Encouragement Day/Week/Month
4. Connect with Sarah Ockler: Amazonfail a Win for the Indies?
5. Connect With Cynthia Jaynes Omololu: Boy Books