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Our decision was pretty multifacted (see my other reply), but we also switched so we can also evaluate how we value what we watch, and force upon ourselves some
by evilduck 15y ago
Our decision was pretty multifacted (see my other reply), but we also switched so we can also evaluate how we value what we watch, and force upon ourselves some changes of habit. It's a little bit of a lifestyle experiment.
When we blindly spent $60 a month and got unrestricted time access to channels, we ended up not thinking about how that money is spent entertaining us and how we valued what we watched. We weren't directly allocating money towards what we valued. The result was that the TV was always on, we'd be leaving on whatever came on next even if it was of little interest, turning on crap shows as background noise because "nothing else is on", turning it on in the bedroom and staying up later than necessary just because there was something to watch, putting off doing the dishes or housework until a commercial break, not watching it meant we were wasting the subscription cost, etc, etc. Not that I'm morally against what's on TV, I just think the passive nature of watching TV is a bad default way of life, overall it was just a toxic influence on our behavior.
By having to explicitly select and buy programming, we see where the time and money is spent and what we really value. The cost wasn't totally a primary factor; we're not hard up for the extra $30 a month saved or whatever but it's something we identified as wasteful spending for the derived entertainment value. We play a lot more background music in the house now to replace the TV noise, and I've also finished two additional books beyond my previous normal amount of reading since dropping satellite service (it was hard to focus and read in the other rooms when a TV was blaring).
Edit: just a note, we actually switched to this set of behaviors over a month ago and started down this path a few weeks before that, but finally cancelled the satellite subscription last week. It was a transition to change that many behaviors.