While too much of anything is detrimental, I don't find watching TV to be a waste if you are enjoying yourself. Recreation is important for mental health.
Not the person you are responding to - I agree with you that recreation is important. I think we should be talking more about how to do recreational activities that feel beneficial down the line. Or are recreation and being beneficial mutually exclusive? Overall, it feels harder to do beneficial recreational activities.
If one is like I used to be, TV is mindless but it can be mindful. After meeting someone who changed my perception of the medium, I find that TV is one of the most engaging and challenging exercises. You are constantly searching for symbolism, inspirations and trademarks of actor/writer/director. There is so so much to do when watching TV that anyone who says it’s a waste is missing a huge opportunity!
TV got good. It's hard to even talk about "TV" these days because we're combining artfully-crafted, thought-provoking shows like The Leftovers or The Wire with things like Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men. Same medium, but radically different forms of content.
Another big difference is the way we consume. "Watching TV" used to mean watching whatever was on in the current timeslot, which often meant flipping through channels until you found the least-bad thing you could tolerate.
In the last 10-15 years that style has all but disappeared* and been replaced with Netflix-style services (and maybe PVRs for sports fans and 60+), where you don't watch "TV" but watch "a show".
Browsing tiktok or YouTube might be the closest thing that people still do to channel flipping, but since it's customized and endless, there's never a need to settle for the "least-worst" thing you can find.
(* I'm sure there are people that still do this, but I'm saying this based on my circle of close family/friends, many of whom are non-technical).
Strongly agree with all of that. When I hear people complain online about all the different streaming services, I assume they're very young and didn't have to suffer through "appointment viewing" and "channel flipping" and watching "whatever's on". And a third of it all was commercials.
The fact that many people still watch TV that way baffles me.
Yeah there's definitely different types of shows. Just like there's different types of books. There are some shows and movies that have deep philosophy to them and you can spend hours, days, or weeks mulling over and discussing. The same is with books. There are also plenty of trash novels that are purely for entertainment. Is there a difference between that and your standard mindless sitcom? Probably not. But we also shouldn't paint with too wide of a brush or we're closing ourselves off to a potentially powerful form of art, expression, and even a method of learning.
I also think there is nothing wrong with purely engaging in entertainment. But this is an issue when it gets addictive and becomes too much. We need to be nuanced about these discussions rather than being so judgemental and putting our own perspectives as the higher status. That's just stroking our own egos and that's similarly not healthy nor beneficial to society as a whole.
