For my entire life until we moved into our new house I had cable, nearly every imaginable channel, and I never fathomed my life without it. Whenever I turn on a cable channel I take a step back in time to a memory of years past. Speed Channel depicts my childhood years dreaming of cars non-stop, ESPN reminds me of my awkward puberty years when I was trying to find where I fit at school (hint: not with that crowd), and Comedy Central reminds me of finding my place in high school (acting and comedy).

In college I got a Tivo with lifetime service, which added fuel to the fire of my TV escapism. No longer did I have to plan my evenings around TV, my Tivo would allow me to be free from the agony of ads and timeslots, but my Tivo was smarter than  me. It started recommending new shows that I might like. Soon I was staying up until 1 or 2am every night just to finish my TV Shows. My schedule began to conform to the shows that Tivo recommended and now I was back in the same rut as before except I was watching more TV. 

Then something magical happened, something life altering, something fantastic… Hollywood writers went on strike. There were no new episodes for me to watch, and I found myself having <gasp> free time.

This concept of free time is something that I had never felt before, I had always consumed myself with TV because it gave me a false sense of accomplishment. What would I do with this free time? Well, I became productive. I started working out more, I finished the many half-finished projects from remodeling the house we were living in at the time, and I started writing this blog. But perhaps the most surprising thing about all of this is that the only thing I missed about TV was the ridiculous antics on The Office.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like we don’t watch TV…truth be told the only shows I consistently watch are The Office and 30 Rock, and Mary swaps out 30 Rock for Private Practice; we just watch TV differently now. I have an antenna in the attic that picks up all of our local stations in HD, and I have a computer hooked up to the main TV. The computer enables us to watch whatever we want from the iTunes store or Hulu whenever we want, and we have our trusty Tivo set up in the bedroom.

Now Mary and I focus our time productively on being entrepreneurial. We each have business plans that we are working on, and we are working together to start selling some of our home baked bread at a local farmers market. Who knows, the lack of cable may not just save us money, it may make us money.

Have you ever thought about what you could do if you cut out TV? I bet it’d be pretty amazing.

The next paragraph is a bit of a rant, feel free to ignore:

I’m not against having cable entirely, I’m mainly against it’s pricing structure, much like gym memberships, cable companies take your money while giving little to nothing in return. In fact they don’t really give you anything except for the opportunity to spend your time watching TV. I would actually be willing to pay a premium per channel to be able to choose the channels I want, I don’t need 100 channels, I don’t even need 25, why not let me choose and make more on a per channel basis? But I digress…

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