It’s no secret that television is one of the worst inventions on the planet. It ranks right up there with cell phones and firearms, all of which have done little more than inflict pain on the human race. To argue otherwise is merely to equivocate.

I don’t mean to sound the trumpet of Luddism. I am, after all, pounding away on my Macbook, trying to feed the beast of the most bitchin’ twenty-first century digital magazine ever made. But it’s worth remembering every now and then that some of our greatest cultural pastimes remain, in fact, the very things that hold us back from greatness.

Television is high on that list.

About two weeks ago, as the wife and I were once again streamlining our budget to correspond with our anemic entry-level salaries (we recently changed careers and accepted the mantle of poverty in order to finally work in jobs that we love, as opposed to jobs that we tolerate just to pay the bills), my eyes zeroed-in on the spreadsheet row marked “Comcast.” Thanks to the expiration of a plum 12-month package, we were now paying $102 per month just to get the basic goodies: networks, regional channels, and the mid-market favorites like MTV, VH1, ESPN, Comedy Central and E!. We didn’t have TiVo. We didn’t have On Demand. We didn’t even have one of those “boxes,” which kindly bestows the cinematic excellence of HBO et al. We just had the eponymous cable sprouting from the wall, feeding us televisual content and Internet access.

So I called Comcast to bargain them down. They offered to install a “box,” which, in this instance, would not give us any more channels than we already had. It would, however, provide all of our current channels plus On Demand, for $72 per month. I scheduled a house call to install the box a couple weeks hence.

A few days before our appointment, I began to get cold feet. I’ve lived periods of my life without television, and despite the occasional moment of discomforting uncertainty---"What do I do with myself?"---I’ve found those periods to be among the most rewarding of my life. In Virginia, I lived in a two-bedroom duplex by myself without television. I spent that year getting a graduate degree in half the time it took my cohorts. In Boston, I lived in a 250-square-foot studio for a year without television. I spent that year learning how to meditate. I also applied to half a dozen more graduate schools and got into one at Stanford.

When I don’t have television to chomp my hours, I find myself dreaming up essays and novels and short stories I could write. Not that I write them. But just imagining that I could do those things and remembering that I'd like to do them seem to me important points. I call friends and family more. I exercise. I work longer hours at the office. And in my current habitat, I can’t think of one occasion in which turning off the television and turning to the wife for conversation or high jinks hasn’t brought a greater quotient of happiness than when the tube was tuned into, say, “The Big Idea with Donnie Deutsch.” (Excellent show, that.)

Now I love "The Big Idea with Donnie Deutsch." I love “Dr. 90210.” Perhaps as much as I love Sam Adams Summer Ale and Rasheed Wallace. But unlike my favorite beer and my favorite power forward, watching Dr. Rey throw some nunchaku immediately before implanting some 400-cc boobies in a Southern California “actress”---albeit endlessly entertaining---always ends up being distinctly unrewarding. I could never put my finger on why that is, but I’ve always known it to be so.

That was before I learned that we have always thought of television in a backwards sense. See, the traditional formulation goes like this: we watch entertaining shows, and in return for not being charged the production cost of those shows, we tacitly agree to watch some advertising.

But that’s not really how it works. We in fact submit to watching advertising, and in return we are fed pseudo-entertainment that is always built around and influenced by the advertisers who are paying for it. In other words, we are performing the work of watching. (This isn't my idea, by the way.)

That’s why you’re generally tired whenever you polish off a four-hour stretch of “West Wing” reruns on Bravo. You just performed invaluable marketing work for countless companies. No wonder, then, that you don’t feel rejuvenated. The only rejuvenation that occurred was in the larger capitalist economy, where an advertising firm, its client, and the local and national TV networks and cable companies cashed some checks that were paid for by the itsy bitsy portion of your soul that you just deposited into their pockets.

Consequently, the wife and I decided it was best to mete out our souls as little as possible. Especially considering that our current salaries prohibit us from meting out our souls at all. So I called Comcast the day before our appointment and demanded the most elemental package they offered---channels 2 through 29, nothing fancier than the Discovery Channel, for $62 per month. The guy on the other end of the line---by the way, why are they always named Sean?---expressed incredulity at my request. Why would I want fewer channels?

A day later, we had the slim channels we wanted, and dirty snow on the rest. The writers' strike even made network fare tougher to digest, seeing as it was all pretty much stale. I imagined that we would quickly settle into our newly liberated leisure time. Within a week, we'd be pushing out our chairs after dinner, retire to our respective computers and compose brilliant masterpieces in our respective vocations.

One problem. Forty-eight hours later, the cable miraculously bounced back to our original service.

I’d tell you more about it, but Comedy Central is replaying "Undercover Brother" right now, which I don't think I'ver seen. I fucking love Eddie Griffin....