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How to Live Without TV (a Past Post)

This post was originally published over five years ago, but it echoes a book I am currently reading (or possibly the book echoes the post – they were published in the same year). In Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport writes, “you’re more likely to succeed in reducing the role of digital tools in your life if you cultivate high-quality alternatives to the easy distraction they provide. For many people, their compulsive phone use papers over a void created by a lack of a well-developed leisure life.”
Oof.
I feel Past Me provided some good advice here for Present Me on how to not get sucked into the small screen. So, bearing in mind that we’re not just talking about TV here, how do you live without TV?

  1. Remove TV from house; delete all TV-related tabs, apps etc.
  2. Ta-da! You are living without TV.
black and white drawing of a TV dumped in a rubbish bin


Except what we really want to know is not how to live without TV, but how to thrive without TV. (Side note: if English was a more sensible language, that would have rhymed and been an all-around more catchy sentence.)

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Rumours of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

There are two kinds of blog readers: the kind who notice when someone doesn’t post in a while, and the kind who notice the silence only when it ends. I am of the latter sort, myself, but for those of you who are of the former, this reassurance: I am indeed alive.

Alive, but not in the best of health – hence the nearly three month silence. After struggling for some time with a variety of issues with which I will not trouble you, I have now received a “working diagnosis” of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (which, yes, is what the Caped Gooseberry has had for lo these many years).

Sitting up – as opposed to sitting down – is something I don’t have as much energy for as I used to, so sitting up at the desk for the hours needed to produce a blog post on the computer has not happened in some time.

A painting of a woman dressed head to toe in flowing blue-black, collapsed on a green sofa piled with cushions. She is looking at the closed yellow book in her right hand. Her left hand dangles off the side of the sofa.
Battery unexpectedly flat.
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Posture & Penmanship in Paintings: How Not To Do It

One cannot overstate the importance of good posture for an ergonomic writing habit, as I recently discovered while extending my ambidexterity to handwriting. (Ergonomic: ergo, meaning therefore, and nomic, meaning in the nature of a gnome – viz. you’ll end up wizened like a gnome if you don’t do it properly).

Of course, no sooner had I schooled myself in the Right and Proper way of positioning one’s assorted body parts while writing, than I discovered endless examples of those who were doing it in a Wrong and Improper way. Especially in art. Let us consider a collection of these Improprieties.

But first – and at intervals throughout, to keep your eye in – let me show you someone doing it right. (Note: nearly all these writers are writing with their right hands. For greater left-handed representation, hold a mirror up to the screen.)

A woman in a late nineteenth century dress and hairstyle, sitting at a table with an envelope in her left hand and a pen in her right.
Albert Edelfelt: Dam som skriver brev. NM 2653

The Lady Writing a Letter is sitting up straight – neither leaning on her desk nor slumping in her chair (though I am prepared to believe her corsetry is assisting in this respect). Her upper arm is in line with her torso, and her lower arm is at approximately 90 degrees to her upper arm, and to her torso. Her arm rests gently on the paper, but her hand is not dragging at the page.

One girl leans over her page as she writes. Another girl leans on the table next to her and watches.

This girl is demonstrating the problem of bending over one’s page: it becomes impossible to keep one’s arms at the right angles, and they begin to stick out like chickens’ wings.

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