We're entertaining ourselves to death!

My house officially has: YouTubeTV for our regular TV coverage and then have Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus and most recently added HBOMax. Seriously? I told the family the other day that we're not adding another entertainment medium without removing one.

I'm firmly convinced that our Smart TV's are making us more and more dumb! How much entertainment can one person or family take in.

We are the most entertained people in history. It is reported that 15% of the worlds web traffic goes to Netflix.

I tried to find out how many movies or shows are on Netflix and while it's hard to find, one person did extrapolate that based on the size of the memory files in Netflix (not sure how they figured that out), there is over 36,000 individual titles available. That's enough movies to watch back to back for 6 1/2 years!

Direct TV's "Premier" package has access to over 330 channels. I can literally watch movies or TV shows anywhere!

Do we need this much entertainment or noise?

In 1955, AW Tozer wrote:

"If this sense of need and a feeling of dependence are at the root of natural religion, it is not hard to see why the great god Entertainment is so ardently worshiped by so many. For there are millions who cannot live without amusement; life without some form of entertainment for them is simply intolerable; they look forward to the blessed relief afforded by professional entertainers and other forms of psychological narcotics as a dope addict looks to his daily shot of heroin. Without them they could not summon courage to face existence.

No one with common human feeling will object to the simple pleasures of life, nor to such harmless forms of entertainment as may help to relax the nerves and refresh the mind exhausted by toil. Such things, if used with discretion, may be a blessing along the way. That is one thing, however, the all-out devotion to entertainment as a major activity for which and by which men live is definitely something else again."

Paul's interpretation - like many things in life, when a good thing becomes an ultimate thing then we have to stop, reflect and ask ourselves if this has become an idol. Using entertainment to relax and refresh our minds is a good thing. Using entertainment as a major activity becomes an idol.

From the first sentence of this blog, you can see that I'm not an "anti-TV" guy but I do think we need to be cautious with the amount of consumption we are experiencing (and that doesn't even take in to account the garbage that has to be created to fill 6 1/2 years of viewing on just one medium alone.

My recommendation - Do a self-check, it's almost like that screentime statistic that pops up on your iphone. How much time are you spending in front of screens. Consider a new hobby, good book or good conversation with a neighbor.