Commentary : TELEVISION AND MATERIALISM: WHAT GIVES?

You come home from work too tired for anything but watching TV. You see things on TV you end up buying. Then you go to work to pay for them. And then ... why, you come home tired and watch more TV.

Is this what they mean by interactive television?

The typical viewer has been chasing his tail since TV blinked on nearly a half-century ago. Now Vicki Robin has some modest suggestions for breaking that cycle of overindulgence.

Her first suggestion: Recognize the cycle and how you’re caught up in it.

Robin, a Seattle-based lecturer and writer, collaborated with fellow activist Joe Dominguez on a book about the spurious connection between monetary wealth and material satisfaction.

“Your Money or Your Life--Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence” argues that--flash!-- dollars don’t guarantee fulfillment, and that, for many Americans, money-making comes at far too great a cost.

At times, so does TV, Robin adds during a recent interview.

“There’s too much passivity in watching television,” she says--not just the act of blind-gazing at the tube by the hour, but also that familiar non-decision to watch in the first place.

There’s an old slogan that “time is money,” but Robin proposes that, more aptly, “money is time.”

Quite literally, your money represents a certain measure of what she labels “life-energy.” The more bucks you spend, the more of your finite life-energy is required to recoup that outlay.

Meanwhile, profligate TV-viewing runs up the tab even further.

“The more television you watch,” Robin cautions, “the more desire you feel because of the advertising, and the greater need to buy more stuff.”

“Clutter” in her lexicon is whatever you own that doesn’t really serve your needs, yet takes up space in your world.

“Clutter” is also the TV industry’s own term applied to advertising, previews, station IDs and other non-program fare. One obvious way to banish that sort of clutter is to “time-shift”: Tape your favorite shows, then, when you play them back, zip through the commercials. (And what a value, timewise: Six shows for the price of five!)

To go further in breaking the cycle, just pry your eyes off the tube and look elsewhere for validation. “We look to our peers to see how we’re doing,” Robin says. “It’s called ‘keeping up with the Joneses,’ and if there’s a big discrepancy between what they have and what we have, we start to feel unhappy.”

So what happens when you get an eyeful of TV’s rich and beautiful “Joneses,” those contented, successful folk who populate commercials and programs alike?

“There’s an illusion that the people on television are your friends,” Robin says, “and when television becomes your ‘neighbor,’ when the ‘people’ you visit with include too many TV stars and make-believe happy families, then you’ll have trouble not feeling dissatisfaction with the life you live.”

Robin suggests that the viewer guage the peak of his or her “TV fulfillment curve.”

“Figure out the maximum amount of television you get value from--whether that means learning something, having a good laugh, or whatever. The longer you watch beyond that point, the further down the curve you slide.

“When you overindulge--whether it’s buying stuff or watching TV--every new thing erases the pleasure of the last, and it becomes a diminishing experience of fulfillment.”

Indeed, research has found that the longer a viewer watches television, the less the viewer is likely to enjoy it--yet progressively greater is the effort required to shut the darned set off.

“But if you watch more judiciously, and time-shift when you can,” Robin says, “it leads to less temptation and fewer expenditures, which can actually lead to less time working, which can lead to other, more rewarding pursuits besides TV. And around it goes again.

“The bottom line: You have more energy, more happiness, more sense of purpose.”

Now, that’s a cycle worth setting in motion.