It has been often said that the 1st step to becoming a better investor is a simple one — put off the TV.
Top financial channel — and its competitors — will simply cause you to dumber as well as poorer.
This arrives like a surprise to a lot of people. After all, financial channels present a steady stream of well-credentialed specialists, people with extraordinary titles from major companies. Nearly everyone hold PhDs, years of experience, or manage large sums of funds. They appear good. They look sharp. They’ve insightful thoughts and reams of arcane investment data tripping off their tongues.
How might following to them possibly turn you a worse investor?
Because the unstated premise behind these shows — which exist, obviously, to sell advertising — is that investors needs to be in a near-constant state of response:
“The market is striking a new high today. What must traders do at this time?”
“The Fed has left rates of interest unchanged. What must traders perform at present?
“GNP was up an unexpectedly strong 3.8 percent previous quarter. What must investors perform at the moment?”
They make on an analyst with a bullish view as well as another with a bearish one — on shares, bonds, currencies, commodities, interest rates, or the economy — allow them to square off for a few minutes, then cut to commercials. After sometime later, they come back and perform it some more. This goes on day after day, every week, year after year.
Why do so many intelligent, talented, educated people spend many hours staring blankly in the tube?
The quick answer, certainly, is we like it.
But can we, actually? Is watching TV more fulfilling than what you would be doing if you were not?
If you receive particular about it, you will think a little ridiculous. For example, perhaps you have told yourself something like: Gee, I actually need to get further exercise, but Dancing With all the Stars is on in ten minutes. I promised my daughter I would educate her how to play chess, but these Seinfeld re-runs are very funny. It’s long past time I ended in to go to my getting old grandmother, but I can not avoid the playoffs! I promised myself I’d figure out how to play the piano this time, but this week is a finals of American Idol. I really do need to plant that garden. However I am unable to miss my soaps. If we’re challenged, obviously, we’ve got a lot of rationalizations.
Let a TV critic tell you that many of the programming is unnecessary junk and you may point to the learning stuff on The History Channel, Discovery, or National Geographic, even if that is only a fraction of what you watch.
If he replies that you’re still being subjected to hours of commercials each week, you tell him you tape the programs and fast-forward through them.
If he counters that taping just means that you can use even more television, you possibly can always play your trump card: “Mind your own business.”
After all, you’re an adult. It is your life to survive. You can still spend it any way you want.
But, between South Park and Grey’s Anatomy, would you ever reflect on the way you’re spending it?
Regardless how good the programming is — and let’s face it, some of it is great — or else how rapidly you fast-forward through the commercials, the hours you spend in front of the tube is time you haven’t used up pursuing your objectives, living out your dreams, or just interacting with another human being. If you’re elderly and companionless — or housebound for some other cause — that is different. But that doesn’t describe the majority of us.
Twenty-five years before, Neil Postman warned of our consuming love affair with TV in Amusing Ourselves to Death. In the book — a jeremiad about the danger of turning serious conversations about politics, business, religion, and science into entertainment packages — he argues that TV is generating not the dystopia of George Orwell’s 1984 but rather of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World:
“Spiritual devastation is more likely to appear from an enemy that has a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother will not observe us, by his choice. We tend to watch him, by ours. There is no require for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population gets distracted by trivia, while cultural life is redefined like a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public talk gets a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk.”
He concludes that we’d all be better off if TV got worse, not better.
According to A.C. Nielsen, 99 percent of American households have TV set. Two-thirds own above 3. These sets are on an around of 6 hours and 47 minutes per day.
49 percentage of Americans polled say they spend excessive time before the Television. It isn’t hard to see why. The average viewer watches over 4 hours of Television each day. That is 2 months of non-stop TV-watching per year. Within a 65-year life, any person will have spent nine years glued to the tube.
You already understand how little you’ll gain by watching so much TV. But have you as well considered what it’s costing you?
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