This is a fun and sobering post but this is actually a topic I (Jeff) think about all the time. I just turned 30 years old so I have been evaluating my life in a fresh way. I have lived 3 decades so far and I’m praying for strength to live 7 more. There is one decade of my life that I am not happy with, my 10-20 year old years. I believe it is a conservative guess that I watched 3 hours of television/movies every day for those 10 years. Some days much more and some days less. How much of my life did I invest in tv in just 10 years? I invested 455 days of those years to non-stop television. It would have been the equivalent to watching tv 455 days straight without getting up off the couch and without sleeping, non-stop sitting there and watching tv. What if I would have kept going for 50 years? 455 Days x 5 = 2275 non-stop days of television. That is over 6 years of non-stop television over a 50 year period. This is the normal investment of time by Americans, 3 hours a day.
Here are some statistics I have figured out for my own fun and for more fuel to limit the amount of television and movies I watch.
Average = 3 hours per day. Weekly Average = 21 hours. This equals 1/8th of Your Week. If a week was 8 days long, you would spend 1 entire day of that week watching tv. This is 45.5 days of straight tv a year (a year is 365 days). 1/8th of Your Year. That is 1.5 months out of 12 months.
3hours per day for 10 years = 10,920hrs/455 days. 1.25 years of Your 10 years watching tv.
People over the age of 65 watch an average of 7 hours a day, which is 49 hrs a week. That is106 days out of 365 on tv. Over 1/3rd of a person’s life is on the television at this rate. This would mean that half of each waking day was spent watching tv if that person was awake 14 hours a day.
I have had thoughts of starting a “30 Day Challenge” for myself and anybody else that wanted to. No television for 30 days and in it’s place read the Bible, pray or serve others practically. That might be the next post:)