As my wife and children are currently still in vacation my evenings are quite calm.
I thought, after a week of vacation I will use the evenings to get a lot of things done that cry for getting done in a few calm hours. Actually with all that silence I got quite tired and my soul and spirit dropped off for distraction. So I landed in front of the TV in the later evenings.
It has been quite a long time that I had time to watch TV. What I noticed is that after watching about 2 hours TV (some CSI like series) afterwards I felt bad - I had the impression that I just burnt 2 hours of my precious time. Two unrecoverable expensive hours. Horrible!
Two days later I landed again in front of the TV - approximately for the same time. But I watched two episodes of Star Trek Next Generation. Impression afterwards was different. Although I somehow thought that I could have made more from that time, I felt much better than the other day.
Investigating the situation I found that I got some interesting new viewpoints from watching the Star Trek episodes. The other day I went to bed frustrated about the all negative (and IMHO unrealistic) stuff (crazy people murdering in crazy ways). That time I went to bed thinking in a gentle way about some aspects of my world. And it made me think of my loved wife and children so that I sent them a miss-you-message before falling asleep.
I tell you this for one single reason: TV is not vasting time in general. You must carefully choose what you watch! - Choose to watch what is good for you!
It does not mean that you may not watch action movies - no - I learned a lot from several action movies (yes, sometimes just one or two very relevant sentences - however) - it depends on how you look at them. But of course, by tendency there are other movies where you can learn more from... - Star Trek is a special thing - I find it full of philosophy and I used to watch it a lot in former, former times. I would say, Star Trek did influence my viewpoints a lot (see links below for example)! Who did not watch it - you missed something! But remember to look at the philosophic and moral elements rather than on the action elements.
Related posts: The resource problem, The main purpose, What to learn from the Borg
