Very interesting study reported in the Wall Street Journal on happiness and how TV may affect it adversely.
“Instead, there’s been a significant increase in the hours devoted to what the authors call “neutral downtime,” which is mostly watching television. Women now spend 15% of their waking hours staring at the tube, while men devote 17%.
Watching TV may be low-stress and moderately enjoyable. But people aren’t mentally engaged the way they are when they’re, say, exercising or socializing.”
I think television can be a good element of interaction between couples or families. If you have a few favorite programs that you get excited about watching together, and discuss them during the week, and antipate them together, it can be a very accessible, social, stimulating shared activity. Not everything of value has to be reading Dickens out loud or going out to dinner or writing sonnets together.
I think the author underestimates the value of an activity that is “low-stress and moderately enjoyable.”
The problem is the amount of time spent on it. But that has nothing to do with the substantive content of television; its more a question of diversity and balance. The author mentions exercise and socializing as keys to happiness, but spending 17% of your waking hours training for a marathon or going out to bars is going to lead to unhappiness.
Focusing on downtime activities obscures the fact that the main problem with happiness in our culture is that we spend 60-70% of our waking hours getting ready for work, driving to and from work, and working. Even if we spend 17% of waking hours in the most fulfilling activity possible, it can never make up for the time spent earning.