A Simple Piece Of Advice – “Blow Up Your TV”

This article, originally entitled ‘A Simple Piece Of Advice’, was written by Joel F. Wade and published at The Daily Bell

Blow up your TV, throw away your paper
Go to the country, build you a home
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches
Try and find Jesus on your own. – John Prine

Sometimes what’s most important for your sense of happiness and wellbeing in life is what you don’t do. There are vices such as smoking, alcohol and drug abuse and impulsive anger that very clearly and predictably can destroy your health and/or your happiness. I was thinking about some of the common hurtful behaviors that continue to come around with my clients year after year, and one stands out significantly: watching TV.

I don’t mean watching an occasional show and I don’t think you have to get rid of your television entirely. But every time you sit down and turn on a news show you are likely to feel worse by the time you’re finished.

Not only is it obviously skewed politically but it is also skewed toward the worst, most violent and horrific behavior of humanity from around the world.

While mankind’s history has been chock full of violence and horrors, as civilization has developed, violence has decreased at a nearly miraculous pace, as Steven Pinker shows in his book The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined. You can find more about that in Lawrence Keeley’s book, War Before Civilization.

Of course, for any victim of crime, this decrease is irrelevant at the time. Violence is violence, and the experience can be devastating.

But here’s the problem with TV: As I write this, there are 7,031,500,129 people on Earth at this moment. Unless human nature changes and violence completely disappears from the face of the Earth, even the tiniest percentage of those seven billion-plus people will be causing trouble, some of them horrific, brutal, devastatingly evil trouble.

The chances that any of that is happening or is likely to happen to you or your loved ones is not zero but it is certainly dramatically lower than the news shows would lead you to believe.

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