Young people need to watch more TV

It's Spring Break apparently. I never kept track of that. Isn't it only a week? It always seemed like a lesser vacation to me when I was in school. I think I got dragged off to see relatives on Spring Break which was an outrage. Of course, now, a week off work sounds pretty good. I haven't had a vacation in years.

Florida is trying to crack down on Spring Breakers, shutting down bars, restaurants and beaches and banning gathering of more than ten people to stop the spread of the coronavirus. If you want to go on Spring Break, go to a remote cabin in the woods where you can avoid human contact. Or do what I did and stay home and watch TV.

TV has probably lost a lot of its allure. There's so much more of it now. You can always see something good and you don't have to worry about missing anything. Back in the 1980's, I saw a child crying in a restaurant. His parents dragged him there promising he'd be home in time for The A Team but they ran into friends so the poor boy was stuck there while his parents callously blathered away. Today he'd just watch it later on streaming video.

I had written on this blog long ago about a documentary called Cinemania (2002) about New Yorkers with a pathological need to attend movies, mostly foreign or classic movies. They weren't academics, they had no interest in writing about movies or in making movies. They just had this need to go to them, and they went to several a day. Some had trust funds, some were on unemployment or disability. At least one was autistic and others had OCD. One signed up for a dating service and for a profile just wrote at great length what kind of movies he liked.

It made me feel a lot of better about all the TV I used to watch. It seemed pretty healthy in retrospect.

And, back in the '90's, there was some professor promoting "communitarianism" who wrote a book called Bowling Alone. He felt the decline of bowling leagues and the rise of individual bowling was a sign of social decay.

I didn't read the book but I read a review. The critic argued that people bowled and played bridge with their friends in the '50's out of desperation because they had few entertainment options.

I lived in Boston for a time in the '80's. I was working an office job and found it strange that my-coworkers came to work each morning talking about what they watched on TV the night before. They were in the big city! There was so much to do!

But after a while I calmed down. I'd seen all I wanted to see of the city. I'd still go to the Brattle Street Theater now and then, but I started relaxing and watching TV in the evening. I was much happier and saved a lot of money.