Nehaveigur

I was driving my oldest kid back from kindergarten when she asked, “Papa, how come some houses don’t have a TV?” I realized that she had been looking through the living room windows we were driving past, noticing that while most of the houses had a TV screen on their walls, some didn’t. I explained that while some of those houses didn’t have a TV, others had one that wasn’t visible from the street. While I was talking, I realized that she was really asking about something else. Why was our own house one of those that didn’t have a TV?

When I was a kid, we didn’t have a TV either. My wife didn’t have one growing up either, so it never occurred to us to get one when we moved in together. It’s not something that we think is particularly important, and we never bring it up by ourselves since we don’t want to come across as insufferable.

I think my parents didn’t get a TV because they thought it wouldn’t be good for us kids. They were also suspicious of other technology such as microwaves, so we didn’t have one of those either. This probably makes it sound like they were hippies, but that’s not accurate either. My father was a businessman and my mother was a housewife. My upbringing was unusual, but there the overall vibe wasn’t particularly technophobe. 

In Austria at the time, you could only get two TV channels, both of them broadcast by the national public broadcaster, which was comparable to the BBC in Britain. One of the channels broadcast mostly culture and news, while the other one would show movies, most of which were imports from Hollywood dubbed in German. This meant that the next day, every single kid at school had seen the same movie and talked about it… except me. It wasn’t easy, but it also wasn’t terrible either. I had lots of time to do other things. That meant reading, spending time outside or doing nerdy things like trying to teach myself stenography. In retrospect, I think it was a good tradeoff.

I suspect that TV and streaming services are mostly wasting time. It’s rare that I watch something and afterwards feel that I’ve gained from it. It sometimes happens with movies, but it almost never happens with series. I therefore try to avoid it.

I don’t know how my own kids will feel about the lack of TV as they grow older. We sometimes take them to the movie theater to watch a cartoon, and they watch TV at their friends’ place when they visit. It’s on those occasions, when they all sit in front of the screen without misbehaving or making a sound for an uninterrupted hour, that I wonder if foregoing easy entertainment is a mistake. Not for their sake, but mine and my wife’s.