Not Watching the News

In today's society, it's almost impossible to avoid hearing the news. It used to be something you listened to at certain times of the day, now it's on around the clock. I have found in the past couple of weeks that I have had more time to live life and do things when I don't watch my news programs on TV, and I am finding out that my life is not damaged at all by this omission. First off, I don't have cable, thus I can save that money for more important things. I have an antenna, which happens to be the one on my old 1990 TV. I have gone through a couple of modern ones from Walmart and when the second one quit working, I found that the old one worked, and I haven't had to replace it. I used to watch news programs on TV from about 4:00 p.m. until, say, around 8:00, and I haven't watched them for at least a couple of weeks. I haven't missed them at all, and I have been much happier. There's a news channel on the radio that I listen to in my car on the way home from work in the afternoon, and listen to on the way to the gym, so I get snippets. I wonder, really, if I'm missing anything important. My dad bought me a TV so I could "know what's going on in the world," when I went to graduate school in Oklahoma in 1990. Before that I had never owned one. His wife even paid for my cable when I was teaching in Missouri from 2000 until 2006. After that I just used the TV to play videos on, and I still use it for that. The TV I have now is the one my dad had at one of the nursing homes he was in before he died. So, now with a phone, even, I pay much less attention to "what's going on in the world," perhaps to a fault, but I'm a lot happier and more relaxed. I don't need to spend nearly as much time as I do on my phone as it is, but now I use it mostly to interact with my friends on Facebook. How much difference it makes if I stay out of toxic interactions with people of different political persuasions? I have decided a lot of that kind of back and forth and drama only serves to create stress and anxiety. It would be different if people could tolerate different points of view without feeling like they have to insert their opinion into everything, win arguments or have the last word on every topic that comes up. I am enjoying my freedom from the TV and invite you to give it a try. I hope to do more reading, more painting, more thinking, more creating, more enjoying life as I continue my virtual abstinence from watching TV news programs. And I am now past the time I should be getting ready to go to bed. I tried to take a nap this afternoon, but couldn't get to sleep, especially after turning on some nice music that then wakes you up with ads. I am really tired of that whole thing, to tell you the truth. I would like to go back to a time with much less involvement with screens. Other than the screen in front of me when I'm typing, that is. Okay, I'm going to go night-night. Night-night.