2011-06-27

Television

As my wife and children are currently still in vacation my evenings are quite calm.

I thought, after a week of vacation I will use the evenings to get a lot of things done that cry for getting done in a few calm hours. Actually with all that silence I got quite tired and my soul and spirit dropped off for distraction. So I landed in front of the TV in the later evenings.

It has been quite a long time that I had time to watch TV. What I noticed is that after watching about 2 hours TV (some CSI like series) afterwards I felt bad - I had the impression that I just burnt 2 hours of my precious time. Two unrecoverable expensive hours. Horrible!

Two days later I landed again in front of the TV - approximately for the same time. But I watched two episodes of Star Trek Next Generation. Impression afterwards was different. Although I somehow thought that I could have made more from that time, I felt much better than the other day.

Investigating the situation I found that I got some interesting new viewpoints from watching the Star Trek episodes. The other day I went to bed frustrated about the all negative (and IMHO unrealistic) stuff (crazy people murdering in crazy ways). That time I went to bed thinking in a gentle way about some aspects of my world. And it made me think of my loved wife and children so that I sent them a miss-you-message before falling asleep.

I tell you this for one single reason: TV is not vasting time in general. You must carefully choose what you watch! - Choose to watch what is good for you!

It does not mean that you may not watch action movies - no - I learned a lot from several action movies (yes, sometimes just one or two very relevant sentences - however) - it depends on how you look at them. But of course, by tendency there are other movies where you can learn more from... - Star Trek is a special thing - I find it full of philosophy and I used to watch it a lot in former, former times. I would say, Star Trek did influence my viewpoints a lot (see links below for example)! Who did not watch it - you missed something! But remember to look at the philosophic and moral elements rather than on the action elements.

Related posts: The resource problem, The main purpose, What to learn from the Borg

2 comments:

seo said...

I never considered that i wasted my time spending time watching episodes.

Franco Kellerman said...

I also recently started watching Startrek, my mate that stays down the passage from me has all the Startrek seasons, from the original series to Next Gen, etc etc all the lot. But I also found that watching this is quite something else, the way John Luke Picard is always so objective when it comes to an issue that needs to handled, is quite something else. But I totally agree with you, I've long stopped watching anything with an age restriction on it. It just seems like a much safer way of not facing reality and the brutality and violence we are faced with in our day to day life. But regardless of me wandering off topic. interesting read. Keep safe, peace. Franco