How you're wasting 9 years of your life.

If someone handed you a gift of 9 years to do as you please, what would you do with them? You can't work or sleep - these are YOUR hours to use, but you must spread them out over your lifetime. Do you think you'd spend them traveling, playing with your kids, talking with your parents, volunteering for a cause? Calling your sister? Exploring? Painting? Inventing? 

So many options, right?

The good news is, you actually have these 9 years! The bad news is that you're probably not using them the way you imagine you would. In your lifetime, you will have watched 9 years of television.

According to the BLS American Time Use Survey, Americans watch over 5 hours of TV per DAY.  On the other hand,  parents spend 38.5 minutes per WEEK in meaningful conversation with their children (A.C. Nielsen Co.). And while an average American youth spends 900 hours in school per year, they will spend 1200 hours per year watching TV.  If that's the case, how are our kids really being educated? We aren't using much of our 9 years on educating our kids if we're only spending 38.5 minutes per week in meaningful conversation with them.

Let that reality sink in.

I work in a hospital, mostly with older adults, and hear about so many regrets relating to broken relationships, spending too much time working, and waiting to live life until after retirement. There are a few things I've never heard anyone regret and I like to take note of both the said regrets and "unsaid non-regrets" to apply to living my life. I can say with 100% certainty that no one has ever told me they regret not watching more television! So, why are we taking 9 years away from our families, dreams, and aspirations to turn off our brains, tune out our loved ones, and stare at a box to watch characters live life?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not on a movement for everyone to burn their television sets. Most of you know that my husband and I own a TV but haven't bothered to plug it in since moving into our house in December (which was more shocking than it should have been to the Walmart employee who just tried to sell me cable). BUT, we do have computers, Amazon prime, and access to my parent's Netflix account. While in the first couple months of marriage we watched no TV, I'd say we now spend an average of 2 hours per week watching something. And I really don't think there's anything wrong with cuddling up on the couch for a few hours a week to shut our brains and bodies off. But, I do think when I get to the end of my life I'd have a problem with wasting 9 YEARS staring at a box.


I'll leave what to do with these statistics up to you.
You have 9 free years to use as you please.
 How do you want to use them? And who would you rather spend these 9 years with: the characters in the box or the people who matter the most to you in the real world?

Read more about TV statistics here