According to Nielson, the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV per day. That's 28 hours a week, or roughly 2 months per year. It's frightening that 1/6 of someone's life can be spent staring at a large box, immersed in some alternate reality. It's unclear whether the blandness of 21st century life is to blame for this rash of escapism, or vice versa. TV is making people more stupid and less accepting to adversity in real life. TV, video games, media, the Internet... it's getting out of hand.
Thanks to one of my friends, I've rediscovered a perfectly normal, interactive, media-less amusement that makes me much happier than pretending that I'm a member of the local police department: board games. That's right, board games. Over the past few days, I've played Scrabble, Pictionary, and Trivial Pursuit. Rather than a one-way relationship with my TV, I've found that it's infinitely more rewarding to laugh and scream over obscure facts and clever words on the scrabble board. Not only is it more fun to interact with people, my brain is also getting a workout, being forced to think more quickly in pictionary, more thoroughly in scrabble, and more all-around in Trivial Pursuit.
Considering I'm a pretty sore loser, I'm eternally grateful to my friends for being supportive and overlooking my semi-violent rantings, probably stemming from the fact that the average American has seen more than 200,000 violent acts on television by age 18 (Nielsen).
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