5 Things I Learned From 5 Months Without Media
In my article about what I learned from 5 months of meditation I mentioned that media influence your view on the world. As I became more and more aware of this, I decided to decrease the amount of media in my life. So the title of this article should have been: 5 things I learned from 5 months without HARDLY ANY media. Forgive me for that. 
Here’s the 5 most important things that I learned from this experiment.
So how did I start?
1) By not turning on the TV. This was a big step. Though once a week I would watch movies and documentaries that I rented or that friends had lent me. 2) Besides hardly watching any TV, I stopped taking the free newspapers that are handed out at the train stations in Holland. 3) I stopped surfing the web on my mobile phone. 4) I stopped visiting certain websites that were mainly about showing the bad and outrageous things that people do. 5) Before this experiment, I always felt like I had to read all the magazines that I received. Instead, I stopped some of my subscriptions and only kept the ones that really added something. Nowadays I have 2 subscriptions. And I’m thinking of ending 1 of them. 6) I stopped listening to the radio…. But I never listened to the radio anyway, so that was easy.
Which media did I allow?
1) I visited one Dutch news website on a daily basis to keep up with what’s happening around the world. Scanning the headlines and sometimes reading a news article. This would take me about 10 minutes per day. 2) Billboards and all other outdoor advertising media (I tried to turn them off, but I couldn’t ).
So what did I learn from all this after 5 months?
1. The world is not that bad
Around the world a lot of bad things are happening. I can’t deny that. But if you put all those bad things in newspapers, TV shows, news programs, magazines and on websites, you start to believe that the world around you is a bad place.
I was used to watching the TV news for 20 minutes each day, reading a newspaper for 20 minutes each day and surfing the main news websites for 20 minutes or more each day. This means that I spent at least 1 hour per day trying to keep up with all the stuff that had been happening around the world. Mostly bad stuff. 1 hour per day. I’ve been doing this since I was a child. That’s like brainwashing somebody. Voluntarily.
After taking away all the media that I didn’t want to be confronted with anymore I started looking at the world around me. But REALLY looking. It was a pretty friendly world. In no way did it resemble with the negative image that had been growing in my mind. I started talking to people that I had a biased image of through the news. That I feared in some way. Not once was the negative image in my head confirmed by reality. The only trick was to be willing to give people a chance instead of judging them without knowing them.
2. Loads of extra time
Besides keeping up with the news, I also used to spend quite some time watching TV. Sometimes up to 2,5 hours per day. I feel a bit ashamed now, but this was the truth. Think of it. On a day like that I would spend 1 hour trying to keep up with the news and 2,5 hours watching TV programs. And what did these 3,5 hours really bring me? Not much. Then I started thinking how I could use that 3,5 hours in a more useful or pleasant way. In a way that would make me feel good.
Nowadays I meditate 2 x 20 minutes per day, I read books about Buddhism, personal growth, meditation, I do yoga at least 3 times per week, I go for walks with my girlfriend, I started running again, I talk to my girlfriend ( * smile * no, it’s not that I didn’t do that before this experiment but TV takes away a lot of the conversation), I started taking guitar lessons again… And I was able to do all of this, just by taking away a big part of ‘the media’ in my life. Now, how many hours do you think you can add to your life by reducing the part that media consume?
3. A more positive look
Due to less information and news ‘pressure’, due to more time to do the things that I felt had value and due to the feeling of being more in control and really looking at the world around me, I have developed a more positive look at life. Life as it is. It doesn’t mean that I turn my face away from the bad things happening around the world, it just means that I am able to put things in perspective and enjoy things as they are.
4. Experience what you want to experience
Instead of switching on the TV ‘just to see what’s on’, my girlfriend and I nowadays talk about what the day was like. Things that happened, stuff we read about, people we met. It’s looking back on experiences and how we dealt with them. What we learnt from them. This adds to the feeling that a day is given to you to go through experiences and learn from them. That is why I now carefully choose the things that I want to experience.
For example, last week I performed at a stand-up comedy club in Amsterdam. It wasn’t the first time that I performed in my life but I had never done stand-up comedy before. I wanted to experience what it would be like. So I signed up for an open mic night, I prepared 10 minutes of material, invited friends and co-workers to come and see the show and went on stage. It was great.
5. Adding even more hours to the day
Now that I was aware of all the things that I could do in a day by decreasing the amount of media, I started looking for other ways to ‘add hours to my day’. So I started getting up early. For instance, nowadays I start my day with 20 minutes of meditation, then I go outside for a half hour run, then I eat my breakfast, take a shower, brush my teeth, put on my clothes, make myself a pot of tea and start working at 8:30 AM. It gives me so much energy to see that I can do so much more in a day then I used to. Just try it and see what it will do for you.
Final remark: I’m not saying that media as a whole are a bad thing. I just want to point out what impact media can have on your life. By writing this article I hope to make people more aware of this so more people will start to regain control of (a part of) their life and start creating / doing whatever they think will really add value to their and others’ lives.