TV Commercials

I was trying to think of a blog topic that relates to “halving it all” and started to feel like I had exhausted a lot of the topics. Then I thought of TV commercials. And that sent me down an interesting path of thought.

My wife and I some time ago cut our cable TV subscription back to the bare basic minimum. In fact, we would have cut it out completely, but with our internet service, the basic cable TV is almost free, so we kept it. What we discovered some time ago was iTunes and AppleTV. We have found we can buy our TV shows (the few we watch) for less money than the expanded basic cable service. So we did. And while that didn’t “halve” our costs, it did something much deeper.

It eliminated the commercials.

Not only can we watch a one hour show in 42 minutes (yes, a typical one hour show has 18 minutes of commercials), we don’t see the commercials. And while that can sometimes be a conversation blocker in a social setting when someone asks “did you see the new Pepsi commercial?”, it really hasn’t hurt us any. What it HAS done is we now find we want less “stuff”.

We realized in kind of an epiphany yesterday that we are much more content with what we have. We’re not bombarded with the constant 18 minutes per hour of all the stuff we can’t live without. And we’re finding we can live without a lot of it. We don’t need the latest this or that or the new whatever.

And we’re much happier.