Television is the unhappiness machine.

This might seem just the opposite of what you'd think, but TV is concerned with advertising first and program content second. The latter is only a lure to expose people to the former.

There is a dual purpose to advertising. It tries to convince a person that the answer to all of his or her needs, whether those needs are material or not, is something that can be bought. It also seeks to create new needs framed to call for the products being offered. So, though you are watching your favorite program, you are watching it as part of a much larger program that is designed to make you unhappy, dissatisfied with things as they are.

In keeping with our culture, TV is restless to the point of frenzy. It has the capacity to devour ideas, personalities, and, most of all, time. It will take a concept and wring it dry in the desperate pursuit of viewers. It will stretch the limits of taste and any standards of decency to make a spectacle of itself.

The most amazing thing is that people will say they watch TV to relax. The second most amazing thing is that folks will sit in front of this hyperactive device, doing it's darnedest to say "LOOK AT ME!" and yet they appear to be almost asleep, certainly emotionless.

The answer to the noisy electronic salesman is not censorship, but expulsion. When you see TV for what it is, watching it becomes unpleasant. After an extended period of absence, to turn on TV is to voluntarily allow frenzy into your life. The pace of presentation on TV is always increasing, desperately trying to jump over the attention threshold that it lowered yesterday. It shouldn't be in doubt that TV can dull the senses and make people think they are bored when they are alone with their thoughts. It's the same process that makes drug users feel that ordinary life without drugs is unbearable.

Life without TV should not leave you bored. If it does, then you have lost the ability to be comfortable with yourself and that means you have work to do. If you feel like silence is abnormal, could it be that you've been desensitized? Does letting your mind run without electronic stimulation seem scary or does it allow unpleasant thoughts to surface? That should be cause for reflection, not avoidance.

Thanks to electronics, it's possible to live in a completely artificial world. TV is a foundation of that world, endlessly inviting you to forget responsibility through purchasing more than you need or can afford, and to depend on what is offered. TV wants you to yearn, spend and yearn again. So, despite the fact that television is promoted as opening the world to us, in fact it closes the real world. TV is disabling, crippling healthy human beings.

Turn-off-TV days or weekends won't break the habit. What will is to pay such close attention that you can see it for what it is: not a medium that flatters you, but one that insults your intelligence and treats you as a helpless bundle of cravings at the edge of self-control.

The most revealing aspect of broadcast TV in America is that viewers think that it is free. What one pays to watch is beyond measure.

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