why i (mostly) don't watch TV
15 Apr 2026i haven’t had a TV in my bedroom probably since i was 18. other than a few stretches here and there, it’s probably been about that amount of time that i have watched TV regularly. i watched the entirety of scrubs while in the hospital recovering from a car accident. i watched the office as it came out during college with a group of friends every thursday (i think it was thursday). i honestly can’t think of any other TV series i’ve watched top to bottom.
i often get asked why that is.
i mostly don’t watch TV or movies for 3 reasons:
- i love reading. i so so so enjoy the process and energy of reading. it definitely goes back to childhood and i probably could do a whole dissection of the role of reading in my personal development. but putting all that aside for the moment, i just love how i feel during and after reading. when i watch things, i (usually) just feel really different than when i’m reading. i might come back to write more about the feeling i have after i’ve watched something but for now i’ll just say it’s different.
- i have grief about all the books i won’t read. i remember at some point i did a calculation and realized that, if i’m lucky, i’ll read 3000 books before i die. that is SUCH a small number of books. and truly the number doesn’t matter so much as the reality that there’s a limitation. and given how good reading feels to me, i want to focus as much of my consumptive media time as i can on reading.
- on a related tip, there is SO much media to watch and people have such strong feelings about what i should watch and tbh, i dislike “YOU HAVE TO” energy. when i tell people that i don’t watch TV and they often reply, “ok but you HAVE TO watch THIS NEW THING.” the consistency of that response is honestly shocking to me. i have a list of something like 60 or 70 shows/movies folks have recommended in that way. someday, if i change stances, i’ll be so ready lol.
- emotional/visual material is sticky for me in ways i can’t control and i don’t like that. when i read something intense or violent, my mind naturally modulates how much it moves from the world of words into the world of visualization imagery. in that way, things that are too intense for me, i just don’t visualize. with watched media, i have much less agency there. i can turn away but often, it’s too late/i’m too slow/it’s designed for me to not be able to look away (in time or at all). i get nightmares relatively easily and visual imagery from relatively not-intense things can stick in my awareness and dreamscape for weeks or months at a time. and the intense things? phewwwwwww.
so, to be clear, i don’t have any sort of moral judgement about TV/movies or folks who really love them. i believe, just like all media, there are amazing things happening in the TV land and there are awful things happening in TV land. there is very powerful culture-making work being done in TV spaces and i love that. and i just have chosen to focus my energy in book land.
one last point: i am not anti watching TV/movies. i just deprioritize it significantly. for example, one of my partners and i have been watching the 6 episodes of heated rivalry since december. i trust we’ll finish at some point soon, but at this point, i have shaped my life such that finding time to watch TV is a rarity, not so much the norm.
ok that’s it! thanks for reading!
ps - thanks to kohli for helping me realize through an email exchange that i had never written about this. it inspired to me write about it! :)
words / writing / post-processing
673w / 18min / 4min