The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption

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Question: How do you manage to read, write and socialize so much after a 60 hour day job?

Answer: I don’t watch TV.

Seth Godin elaborates –

Where did Wikipedia come from?

All those hours, all that work. Where did the time and effort come from?

Clay Shirky points out that it comes from the TV we’re not watching.

Sure, some of these folks were at work, goofing off, but the real influx of time and energy we’re seeing online comes from TV. Three, four or even six hours a day not spent doing virtually nothing. Multiply it by 800 million people online and suddenly, there’s a huge influx of hours just waiting to be put to good use.

I have written before about why I don’t watch TV — you watch television to turn your brain off and I prefer my brains turned on.

I was introduced to the ‘Turn Off Your TV‘ movement by a funny cartoon strip on Greg William’s BlogJam, based on an equally funny post by Phil Vischer on why any movement to switch off the TV set is a no starter —

When I decided to step off the work-watch-spend treadmill, TV was the first to go.

I haven’t watched any TV for more than a year now, and I don’t miss it much. TV (especially in a pre-TiVo India) expects us to sit through too much advertising and allows us almost no choice in terms of what we want to watch and when we want to watch it. I agree with Steve Jobs that –

You watch television to turn your brain off and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.

– and I prefer my brains turned on.

I am not sure, though, if my children will forgive me for trying to ban Tom & Jerry from the living room.

I have already written about the work-watch-spend treadmill in my post on Annie Leonard’s ‘The Story of Stuff‘, but here’s a little excerpt from the annotated script of the documentary very thoughtfully provided by Annie —

So, in the U.S. we have more stuff than ever before, but polls show that our national happiness is actually declining. Our national happiness peaked sometime in the 1950s, the same time as this consumption mania exploded. Hmmm. Interesting coincidence.

I think I know why. We have more stuff but we have less time for the things that really make us happy: family, friends, leisure time. We’re working harder than ever. Some analysts say that we have less leisure time now than in Feudal Society.

And do you know what the two main activities are that we do with the scant leisure time we have? Watch TV and shop. In the U.S., we spend 3—4 times as many hours shopping as our counterparts in Europe do.