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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

No. I realized TV was what I would now call a "time sink" (didn't have a word for it then) when I was about 15, and stopped watching it. I've never owned a TV. I do sometimes watch old TV episodes on DVD though. I especially recommend Fawlty Towers, Jeeves and Wooster, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and The Saint.

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Amen. Our startup has 5 people and (by coincidence?) none of them own TV's.

I wish I had that type of willpower.

My Dad always had a TV on. Looking back on it, that really wasn't good for any of us.

How are you able to break such bad habits?

You find something else to do. I've never been able to quit an addiction without replacing it with another addiction. It went TV -> MUDS -> Magic: the Gathering -> Star Wars CCG -> writing my own MUD -> electric guitar -> MUDS again -> Harry Potter fanfiction -> C2 & programming language design -> sailing -> Reddit -> News.YC -> Scrabulous -> my startup -> Arc -> hopefully back to my startup again, though I can't be sure of that...

Luckily, if you get to a certain point in a "constructive" project (like a piece of software), it'll start to pull you along and becomes less of a chore and more of an obsession. Unfortunately, it's pretty easy to interrupt that obsession, which is why I should stop overriding my 10-hour noprocrast timeout on news.YC.

Easy. Cancel your cable/satellite subscription, then wait a month. Suddenly TV doesn't seem very important.

If you want to use the pseudo-nicotine-patch method of weaning yourself from TV, do the above and download your current shows off the internet and watch them at your convenience. Eventually those shows will die off, and since you don't have cable/satellite, you won't have any new ones to replace them.

Willpower's got nothing to do with it.

That's like saying, "What? You never strike your children? You must have a lot of willpower."

Here's what to do. Put you TV in front of your house with a sign on it, "Do Not Take".

7 minutes later, problem solved.

At about 16, when I first got a gig writing reviews I decided TV took up too much time. At that point I simply pulled the cable out the back of the thing and just continued to use it to review games.

Now I simply don't have a TV, I still own one but it's in storage. I have a small problem with DVD's, but mostly because it's rather boring eating alone, and I barely play games on my PC anymore since reviewing them made pretty much 90% of games detestable. I literally had to force myself to play through Metalheart: Replicants Rampage, description claimed it was like a new Fallout; I believe they mixed up the game with the feeling of "Oh dear god, that pain is my life draining away" of radiation poisoning.

Now I have so much time without TV that I'm going to blitz out a novel I've been working on over the next couple of weeks. It's been a while since I tried to get anything published, so its about time I _did_ get something published.

I grew up with TVs on a lot as well. Not the constant background noise that some people grow up with, but a fair amount of TV. Cartoons Saturday morning and after school when I was little, and then sitcoms or whatever my parents were watching in middle school.

However, I also grew up with a truckload of books. And one day I finally realized that I wasn't really watching TV; I just happened to be keeping my folks company and reading in the same room the TV was on. I had accidentally (but fortunately!) learned to completely tune TV out. This led to my current state of constant reading. To me, books are TV. Some people have to concentrate to read a book. I have to concentrate quite hard to pay attention to a TV. Weird quirk, but I like it!

This of course means times other than when I put on a DVD or tape or something specifically to watch and turn all the lights out and get lost. But I rarely have that much free time.

I do not have enough willpower not to watch TV if there is a TV in my apartment. But there is no TV in my apartment, and I have enough willpower not to buy one and bring it home.

I realized that 99% of what's on TV is pure crap and wasn't worth paying $70 / month for, so I cancelled my cable service. I use Netflix now so I can watch movies and some TV series, but I no longer just sit in front of the TV and do nothing for a couple of hours a night.

It doesn't have much to do with willpower, it's more about realizing if you don't waste your time on inconsequential stuff, then you'll almost necessarily spend it on something worthwhile.

I don't think it's hard to convince yourself TV is a waste of time...

T.V. has a huge narcotic effect and gives you a "hit" of dopamine rush, very hard to get over. Try googling things that help you regulate your dopamine levels so they're more in balance and you'll find anything from t.v. to smoking easier to quit; for starters: exercise, especially stuff that stimulates glands and lymbic systems, like Yoga and Qi Gong - not so much Tai chi. Running helps a lot but eventually you mess up your joints so biking is good too. Just take it easy and don't look for any quick, extreme radical changes - just setting self up to fail. Instead try this: "I want to reduce my t.v. viewing to 150 minutes of quality t.v. programming of my choice per day and not give in to random crap programming designed to just grab my attention." Step by step.

Reduce it to 150 minutes? Yikes! How much TV do you guys watch? That's an epic film a night and thats considered a target?

If you like sports, that is one sports game a night. When I was in university we had 4 tv's and the ultimate cable package (a benefit of cramming 6 people into a tiny house, things like that become cheap) and a few roommates would commonly watch about 8 hours of tv per day.

However 'watching tv' was more doing school work on the couch with the odd bit of discussion about a good play.

90% of my 'tv watching' then was doing schoolwork.

Well I'm just using that as an example.

Don't you think TV is a good source for information, a useful way to keep up with culture.

If you want a startup to appeal to 'the masses', it helps to know what 'the masses' are into.

J&W ftw

Don't forget "The Prisoner" ... and of course GetSmart.

On another front, don't mean to come off as rude here, but surely somebody among you folks has some experience with Wufoo and can spare a moment to jot a quick reply on the post a few topics below this one? Please? Or is everybody busy watching t.v. ....

Please don't do this. For one thing, posts are dynamically reordered. But it would not be a cool thing to do anyway.

Yeh but you know right after you down-modded me you went straight to Amazon and were like, "Oh yeah, The Prisoner, almost forgot about that - wonder if that's available as a box set."

Whatever you do, please do NOT think of me as you're watching it if you wind up getting it on DVD.

And besides ... I just know I'm going to lose most of my points for this one ... I'm making a perfectly valid point.

Everybody talks about Wufoo here ... yet when I ask for honest, useful feedback, nobody responded for most of the day.

Yet if I were to put up a post like, "Do you think it's better to code in rooms painted blue, or rooms painted green" I'm pretty certain I'd quickly get over 50 responses ASAP.

Here we go ... here come the down mods ... sigh ... 52 points my all time high ... oh well it was nice while it lasted ...

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