No Cable
Life Without Cable Television
By Daniel Muniz

A long time ago while I was visiting a buddy of mine at his house, he was complaining that his monthly cable bill was staggering; somewhere around a few hundred dollars a month. Sometimes the amount was higher and in some months it was a bit lower but it was always around that neighborhood. And that bill was without any other combined services attached to it such as telephone or broadband for Internet access. So in other words, the amount that my friend was paying every month for was solely his cable service and nothing else.

I asked him how he could let his cable bill get out of control.

His explanation was twofold.

First, he subscribed to every package that was offered. It wasn’t that he wanted 300 plus channels but he was forced to buy a group of channels in order to get the one or two networks that he originally wanted. Cable service has always been rigged that way so that you are subsidizing the stations you don’t want. So between him and his wife and his kids, the result was to subscribe to everything, which wasn’t cheap.
 

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Next, his wife found it so much more convenient to use the pay-per-view service instead of dropping by the video store and renting a video. And the convenience created an environment of impulse buying which resulted in them watching more movies than they would normally watch in a month.

So I suggested to my friend that he completely close down his cable service.

He looked at me as if I had a horn sticking out my forehead. I told him not to throw away his television set but just to disconnect his cable service and live for half a year without it. In fact, it might be an interesting experience for how a family can rediscover itself while saving a lot of money.

The first thing he said is that it would be weird to live without cable. But after allowing that comment to slip out, he then shifted his stance by saying that cable was for the kids.

My buddy was only a year younger than I was so I know that he probably didn’t have cable when we were his children’s age. Cable was available back then but it just wasn’t in every household and it did not have anywhere near the 300 plus channels of today. In fact, you could barely get a dozen cable channels back in those days.

However, at the end of our conversation, he admitted that he and his family just could not live a day without cable television. It would be too painful for everyone in his family to endure.

I thought that my friend’s plight was amusing because at that particular time frame in my life, I was doing just fine without cable. Even the lowest priced subscription package was still pretty cheap but that wasn’t an issue for me. I didn’t have a television set in my apartment.

To certain individuals, that revelation was quite a bombshell.

In fact, some people who were aware that I didn’t have television at home must have thought that I was a Neanderthal or that I may be weird. And others thought that I was just underprivileged or downtrodden. Some people even asked me what I did on my downtime since I was a single man during that time. I simply had a lot of outside interests, social activities, and hobbies that didn’t include television.

Of course I thought it was funny how total strangers assumed that I must be ignorant because I didn’t have a TV. During that time, I had a bachelor’s degree in Accounting and I was working as an analyst at a big mortgage bank where one of my duties included developing and maintaining a web site for the company’s intranet. I had also actively worked for a congressional campaign in which I did all of the layout and design for their literature and signs.

But it was also one of the most enriching times in my life. I had plenty of social functions and events to attend including going to a lot of Spurs home games when they used to play in the Alamodome. I also loved watching plays at a small local theater and I truly enjoyed the arts and culture of my hometown. And that was perhaps the time in my life that I leisurely read the most books ever including a number of the classics.

For the span of several years, not having a television was not weird at all to me because I usually had so much to do in my spare time.

I eventually bought a nice big television set and I subscribed to a standard cable package. And now that I am married with a more demanding job along with a couple of screaming kids running around, television has become a bit of a refuge for me whenever I do have a slice of free time.

And as my children get older, I will not mind if they spend time watching TV or surfing the net or playing video games but I don’t want them to get hooked on it. They don’t need to go to the extreme that I went through but there is a lot of stuff out there in the world for them to enjoy, especially in the arts. In fact, there is a whole other life out there waiting to be explored and experienced.

Civilization survived before the advent of cable television and limiting it will certainly not bring about its downfall.
 

COMMENTS FROM READERS

It sometimes surprises me to hear someone say they can't live without cable. I'm a teenager and when I was much, much younger, my parents decided they didn't want a bunch of couch potatoes and stopped subscribing to cable. The result: My family has gone over 15 years without cable. We've entertained ourselves with a combination of rented movies, video games, and books. When DVDs came out, we just watched whatever TV series we wanted on DVD. An entire season could be finished in a week of non-stop watching, free of commercials. -Samuel

Hey, this is a great article! My family of 4 kids and 2 parents gave up TV cold turkey for Lent about 12 years ago. We thought we'd die for the first couple of days, but had forgotten we'd ever watched after a week. When Lent was over we decided we liked life better without TV so [we] haven't had it since. People think we're weirdos too, but unless you try it you don't know if you'll like it. We have the 2 DVD-deal with Netflix, so we do watch movies. -Christian

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