I was flipping though a copy of Eckhart Tolle’s book: A New Earth when I came upon this claim:
The average American by the time his is sixty years old, will have spend fifteen years staring a the TV screen.
Really! Fifteen years? Since 15 is 25% of 60 you would have to watch six hours of television every day since birth to reach that number!
I was skeptical that this could be the case, but when I looked into this, Tolle’s figure appears to be only a slight exaggeration. I found this New York Time article that reports “on average, American adults are watching five hours and four minutes of television per day.”
I must skew the stats. I watch more TV now that I am retired, but very rarely more than a couple of hours in a day. I rarely watch during the day unless it is news in the background. Most watching is after dinner. Sometimes my husband and I “binge” watch a show – that means watching two episodes. More than that would make me a zombie!!
Wow, talk about “deadweight losses” (to borrow a term of art from the world of economics)!