My Parents Threw Away Our TV

an essay on liberated childhood

I don’t remember exactly when or exactly why, but at some point when I was a child during the aughts, my parents chucked our TV. I’m not sure if it was because they had visions of the sporous connection technology (and more specifically, mass entertainment) would soon form with humanity, or because they just didn’t want to hoist it into yet another moving van, but regardless, one day it was gone.

Eventually, we got a screen projector for watching movies, which we got out once a week, and I remember at one point during high school (this would have been the early teens), we had a tiny brick of a TV that looked like it was from the 80s. I suppose it might have been; it could only play VHS and we had no cable. There was no revolving door of cartoons or Xbox binges.

The result of this was that most of my childhood was spent in the Techless Void, or what we used to call “outside.” And books. I read lots of books.

As you can imagine, I had little appreciation for this at the time. I wasn’t bitter, really, and I don’t recall being jealous; I just didn’t realize that I’d been gifted with a profoundly superior experience to that of most of my peers. (I also had the luxury of being homeschooled my entire life.)

I had some sense of what it meant to be free.

I remember countless hours spent with my siblings and our cool friends, roaming the wilds of the Rocky Mountains, searching for prospectors’ lost gold, building fairy cities along riverbanks, and exploring spooky abandoned cabins—rumored to be haunted, of course. And we never brought the parents. Obviously.

Little did I know that, while we were scaling rock faces and fording streams frigid with snowmelt, tunneling through brush and rigging elaborate pulley systems in the trees, a tragically high number of our generation was simply vegetating before the alter of Modernity: placid, subdued, compliant, the toxic spores of radical consumerism taking root within their brains.

This is one reason, I think, why I have been so deeply disillusioned with social media of late. To quote John Savage from Brave New World, “I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

The world we live in has become so incredibly fake, so incredibly plastic, it’s as if the very nature of it is meant to demoralize the human spirit. Our asphalt jungles and corporate ant hills seem perfectly designed to crush the air from the lungs of the imagination until, finally, it offers up one last choking breath before surrendering to life in the pod.

I have a son now, and we don’t have a TV. In fact, my husband and I have been married almost seven years, and we never bought one—not because we had any profound feelings on the subject; we just didn’t want to haul one up the stairs to our second-story apartment. And we were broke college kids, so there was that.

Now, people come into our house, flabbergasted at the fact that someone could manage to stay alive in 2023 without owning a TV, but we’ve never missed it. Of course, not owning a TV hasn’t made me immune from the technological takeover of the human mind—after all, I do have social media. Or, I did. And it took years for me to become cognizant of the effects it was having on my mind, and by extension, my creativity. I’ve only recently begun to try and disentangle myself from this web.

When I was twelve, my family moved away from the Rockies where we always lived near an urban center, to the rural south-central Midwest, fifteen minutes outside of a sleepy town of 1,500 people. Here, you could see the stars: a canopy of light so real it almost seemed fake, as if someone might come in and flip a switch, only for you to realize you’d been staring at the vast, glowing dome of a planetarium. There were no lights here. As Maggie Stiefvater describes in her novel, Call Down the Hawk, “You could see by starlight [back then], after the sun went down. Hundreds of headlights chained together in the sky, good enough to eat, good enough to write legends about, good enough to launch men at.”

We would go outside at 3AM to lay in the grass and watch meteorites rip across the velvet expanse. When I was eighteen, I brought my boyfriend to sit on our porch in the midnight chill of March to study the sky we’d spent the past nine months looking at from a thousand miles apart as we snuck out of our windows to talk on the phone while the world slept.

Impossible things happened under that sky.

Without the incessant whining of the digital world, I spent my childhood free to wander, free to read, to write, to look at the stars and explore the deep well of an unadulterated imagination. I want that back. I want it for my son. I want it for all of us in this cracked, decaying mess of a civilization. And I suspect that, probably, you do too.

I’m not sure how we get there, exactly, but in his book On Writing, Stephen King advises that, if you want to free your imagination, “[…] you could do worse than to strip your television’s electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick in back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.”

And I think that’s pretty solid.