It’s not often that one change will positively affect your life on multiple levels.
After a two week trial run of Netflix on Friday evenings only, multiple books have already been read, productivity has been heightened, evening snacks eliminated, flab diminished and sleep improved. We are now Netflix free.
Even if we rent a movie online once a week, which will cost twice as much each month as Netflix did, we will each have ~50 hours in that same month to allocate elsewhere. So we’re trading ten or twenty dollars for an extra hundred hours.
There’s a William Arthur Ward quote that frequently haunts me: “Empty your moments of the need for entertainment; fill them with the quest for creativity.”
It’s been part of what has kept me going for these past two weeks despite the entrenched habit of watching a movie or a couple episodes of whatever show we’re currently consuming.
It’s helped me push through the withdrawal symptoms that have risen up several times, the fear that I might miss something important. (Which is a rather funny, pitiful thought.)
I’m especially interested to see how this will affect my weight. Part of the addiction is that watching a show is accompanied by assorted sweet or salty snacks. I’ve had almost none since the Manitoba Christmas feast. It’s just a natural consequence of not sitting on the couch staring at the screen.
One thing that has helped is always having a good book on the go, which is made seamlessly easy by Amazon Kindle. A good book, whether fiction or non fiction, has always been more appealing and satisfying to me than all but a few movies. If the two past weeks are any indication, I will likely complete close to 100 this year.
So here we go, launching into deep waters. Having detached from cable years ago due to Netflix, we now detach from Netflix due to what I think might be wisdom.
Time will tell.
Hey Daren,
How is this journey going over a year and a half later?
Thanks for checking on me, Sandy!
Still no Netflix, though I know there will be great temptation with the Breaking Bad movie coming out next month…
My son in law set us up on Plex and we did use it a bit, but it was chippy.
We are now Amazon Prime members due to our increasing number of orders and the free shipping. This also gives us Prime Video.
A few things that are keeping it from being a huge time suck:
1. We generally watch TV shows instead of movies. Even two episodes in a series are less than one regular movie.
2. Amazon Prime reading makes a lot of decent books free, which only adds to our increasing book consumption via Kindle. We typically read ~1 hour each evening before bed.
3. I usually work a bit after dinner and we go to bed quite early, so there isn’t a ton of time to watch.
4. We still have no regular TV, so it takes a little more than simply grabbing the remote to watch something.
One more thing: I’m considering implementing a rule that we can’t watch anything unless I’ve sold something online that day! (Besides my books via Amazon which generally have daily sales.) Not quite ready to pull the trigger on this, but that’s in part due to the fact that we don’t watch a ton as it is.