In San Francisco, there is a whole stratum of people who don't have televisions. This isn't the low-income class by any means. It's more of the lefty, liberal, organic grocery-buying, I get all my news from the BBC, my other car is biodiesel, one time, at meditation camp class of people. The kind who don't have any values that aren't both culturally aware and totally arrogant. These people who, when you mention something pertaining to popular culture, make it a point to point out they what you're trying to talk about is beneath them. They don't say, "I don't watch television," meaning they could but they choose not to. They say, "I don't even own a television," meaning, "I had to get that filthy, disgusting thing out of my house. Watching television is for people who eat at McDonald's. Your conversation is like scrubbing toilets."
I would like to qualify that I am not one of those people, but I currently do not own a television. Correction: I totally own a big-ass television. It just doesn't work, except as a DVD player.
This has significantly changed my life. At the end of the day, I like to watch an hour or two of mindless television before bed. It helps slow my brain down to prepare it for sleep. Other people can read until they fall asleep, but reading makes my brain go nuts and a good book will keep me awake all night. (I may be retarded.) Also, living alone is a little bit too quiet for my tastes (as club trash I'm used to hearing a lot of noise near bedtime) so even if I continue to work on my laptop, I like to have the TV on just for the sound of people.
Now that I don't have the option to watch idiotic sitcom reruns at night, I watch rented DVDs. I have the five-at-a-time Netflix plan, plus I borrow them five at a time from the library, plus I borrow four more at a time from my neighbor Robert. I go through a lot of movies in a week. Luckily, I've never seen most of the classics and I don't go to the movie theatre, so I've never seen any of them before.
The problem with this is that sitcoms are little half-hour blurbs of nothingness that you turn off at the end. Movies tend to run longer, and it's hard for me to shut one off in the middle because then I'll keep thinking about it. And thinking = not sleeping. So I'll often end up watching a movie until it's over, staying up late to do so, and being tired in the morning anyway.
I could just go out and buy a new television, but getting rid of my current television would be a problem. It's huge and weighs about 4,000 pounds. I can't carry it by myself and even if I could, where would I put it? It doesn't exactly fit in the trash barrel, and you can't count on the homeless people to pick it up and try to sell it on the corner. They're more likely to bust out the glass and sleep in it.
Knowing myself, I'll probably just wait until I've watched every movie and every cable series on DVD I can stand. Then I'll turn the useless giant box over, use it as a coffee table, and learn to get to bed some other way. And when someone brings up anything to do with pop culture, I'll sigh and say, "I don't even own a television. Can you pass the soy chips?"