Happiness and television
The NYT has a report on studies claiming that the amount of time spent watching television is a good indicator of how happy a person is: the less time spent in front of the idiot-box, the happier a person tends to be.
The researchers caution that they can’t yet explain the correlation — whether happy people watch less TV or whether watching TV makes you unhappy.
I have no special insight into these studies, but I doubt the statement of the researcher who said, “I don’t know that turning off the TV will make you more happy.” In itself, no. But I think that socializing, exercising, meditating, and reading are inherently more enriching than watching television. But I suspect the relationship works both ways — watching TV diminishes our lives and when we’re unhappy we’re more likely to turn to a passive form of entertainment.
Happy people spend a lot of time socializing, going to church and reading newspapers — but they don’t spend a lot of time watching television, a new study finds.
That’s what unhappy people do.
Although people who describe themselves as happy enjoy watching television, it turns out to be the single activity they engage in less often than unhappy people, said John Robinson, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the author of the study, which appeared in the journal Social Indicators Research.
While most large studies on happiness have focused on the demographic characteristics of happy people — factors like age and marital status — Dr. Robinson and his colleagues tried to identify what activities happy people engage in. The study relied primarily on the responses of 45,000 Americans collected over 35 years by the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, and on published “time diary” studies recording the daily activities of participants.
“We looked at 8 to 10 activities that happy people engage in, and for each one, the people who did the activities more — visiting others, going to church, all those things — were more happy,” Dr. Robinson said. “TV was the one activity that showed a negative relationship. Unhappy people did it more, and happy people did it less.”
But the researchers could not tell whether unhappy people watch more television or whether being glued to the set is what makes people unhappy. “I don’t know that turning off the TV will make you more happy,” Dr. Robinson said.
Still, he said, the data show that people who spend the most time watching television are least happy in the long run.
Since the major predictor of how much time is spent watching television is whether someone works or not, Dr. Robinson added, it’s possible that rising unemployment will lead to more TV time.
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Published: Nov 22 2008
I have had a fraught affair with the television over the last decade. For more than half that time we have not had a TV that could pick up signals but usually had a video or DVD player. The best way I could describe my emotional state after watch more than about 30 minutes of TV is depressed. I would recommend “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television” by Jerry Mander. It is a bit dated now but a classic – especially as he points out that information over-load is not what you get by sitting in front of a television or computer screen – quite the opposite.