We have become a spectator society. We watch rather than do.
An average American watches tv over 4 hours per day. If he watched no tv, he (or she) would extend his life by 3 extra months of awake time per year...equivalent to extending his life expectancy by 20 years!
We watch sporting events. Major league baseball and the National Football League alone have attendance of almost 100 million each year, with over 32,000 at every baseball game and over 67,000 at every football game.
We watch movies. The number of movie tickets sold in the U.S. in 2008 exceeded 1-1/3 billion.
We read a lot of fiction. Yes, reading is a form of watching... watching the characters in the book experiencing life. Years ago, when I was in the military, I wrote a book review column for the Stars and Stripes, and so I spent a lot of time reading. A good friend of mine, a musician hippie type from California, asked me why I read so much. "Whatever pleasures you get from reading how fictional characters live their made-up stories," he told me, "are trivial to the pleasures you can get by living those stories yourself. Come with me to the pub," he urged, "and I'll prove it to you." He was right.
Yes, I know, sometimes there is something to learn by watching. Sometimes we are too tired to do anything and there is a measure of enjoyment in watching. But as I learned years ago, life shines in the doing.
There is one thing we don't usually watch: our lives flying by.
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