When I was kid, 4th grade I believe, I was eating dinner with my family and watching the news as per our usual routine. I always had to watch the 5:30pm evening news (my folks watched CBS with Dan Rather), and then the first portion of the local news at 6pm before I could leave the table. It’s not like I was paying attention, and my parents must’ve known this, but maybe they thought it would get engrained in my fibers and eventually I would become a devoted citizen, wanting to know all about the world and its goings-on. In some ways, that eventually came to be.

I do actually regularly watch the evening news on ABC (and Fridays on CBS solely so I can see the On the Road segment at the end of the show), but I never caught onto watching the local news. When I lived in Boulder, Colorado, I regularly read the daily university paper, which, at the time, had some affiliation with the citywide paper (the Daily Camera), so a lot of the stories were from there or the AP – and it was free, so it was a no-brainer. Most other cities I’ve lived in, I’ve never read the newspaper otherwise – until I moved to the Mid-Atlantic a decade ago and subscribed for about six years or so until it became all too clear that I didn’t know what I was paying for. The paper kept getting thinner and thinner, there was less and less local news, and the price kept going up. I’m all for supporting local news media, but there comes a breaking point. Maybe you think I’m part of the problem; you’re probably not wrong. But I digress, as usual.

Flash back to when I was kid and being forced to watch the news with my family. I guess I did pay attention sometimes if something caught my ear or eye – or my folks directed me to something that should have. There was a story about a middle school kid whose parents offered him $500 to not watch TV for a year and he did it. He read a lot and got really into the military, so much so that he was planning on enlisting after high school. I wonder if he ever did.

The Idiot Box will control you. (Image retrieved from here and comes courtesy of Yaroslav Shuraev.)

I asked my folks if they’d do the same for me, but $500 was way more than they were willing to pay. Instead, they offered $100, and for whatever reason, I took them up on it. There ended up being some weird loophole I was able to exploit about recorded shows, because they’d only placed the restriction on live programming or regularly scheduled programs (i.e., a show that was always on at such-and-such a time every week). But I didn’t really abuse that because I was lazy. Whenever I went to my friends’ houses and they were watching TV I did cheat, but that’s only because they would’ve told me to leave otherwise. I have no idea if my parents knew that, but probably. Maybe they were just concerned with my ability to stick with the wager in our own house.

Fast-forward a year and I made it. I don’t recall if I read more or not, as I always was a fairly regular reader as a kid, even if none of it was especially challenging or informational, and I know I didn’t develop any other interests or skills, so it was mostly a wasted year, I guess. I remember when my dad came into my bedroom the night of Day 365 to give me a crisp $100 bill for completing the challenge. I’d actually just gotten grounded for some dumb stuff I’d done (I can no longer recall why but I was always doing dumb stuff, getting caught for it, lying about it, and then getting grounded longer because of the compounded crime), but he came in and told me he was proud of me for sticking it out. This wasn’t nothing, as I never stuck anything out. I loved to quit. Occasionally, I still do.

Not really sure why that is beyond laziness, but I guess I don’t see a lot of what’s challenging as worthy of sticking out. There are certainly things I wish I would’ve stayed with when I was younger, as my life would surely be richer today, but ain’t nothing to be done about that now. Of course, there are other things I did stick out when I was young, most notably soccer (I played from K-12) and Boy Scouts (Eagle Scout here!), and I managed to be pretty good at making friends and keeping them. When I was younger, I was very diplomatic, so I could float between the groups pretty easily (e.g., jocks, grits, stoners, band dorks, etc.). Again, I digress…

Did that year off from TV have any effect on me today? Probably not much. I’d say I’ve always had a steady diet of mixed programming from the Idiot Box, but I’ve also tried to limit it as I’ve gotten older. It’s very rare that you’ll find me watching TV before 8pm unless there’s a football or basketball game on I want to watch, and even that I’ve scaled back. There was a time when I watched college football every Saturday from 10am to almost midnight, but no longer. It was nauseating. I remember consistently being disappointed in myself every Sunday for wasting a full day and could have nothing to do with the boob tube for a few days. That is, until the next weekend of games came. But I broke that cycle and I have the 15-year chip to prove it!

I do wish I’d learned a lesson and a skill back in 4th grade with that no-TV challenge. When I think about all the things I wish I’d immersed myself in that would be so much fun to be semi-proficient at now during midlife, much of it could’ve – should’ve – began then. I was an idiot child though, so I can’t fault my younger self because my head just wasn’t screwed on tight. But a more thoughtful and forward-looking kid might’ve seized the moment. But that wasn’t me. What are you gonna do?

I often think about what I could/would give up for a year today (yes, I think I’d still need some sort of incentive or a wager of sorts), and I came up with booze. Not that I don’t like to catch a buzz from time-to-time, only that my drinking has tapered off significantly over the years and it’s now solely motivated by socialization – typically at the behest of my friends, and rarely by me. I’m certainly not a teetotaler by any stretch, but it would be an interesting challenge to take on.

You’re probably wondering: why not just give up TV (and streaming and YouTube videos, etc.) for a year? That would be much harder than booze, especially because of sports. But if you’ve got $100 on it, I may just take you up.

Marco Esquandoles
Side Hustler