It started out as a simple question. Maybe that’s because it’s more of a “guy” question. But it’s one that’s been gnawing at me for months.
Cable or satellite dish? (If you were expecting profound thoughts, please turn to the Books section.)
It’s a choice, and I’m grateful to live in a place that offers options along with affluence. It’s just that the choices are coming faster and more furious than Vin Diesel references in People magazine. Which dozen phone companies want my local phone calls? What other eight are fighting for the long-distance bill? And who could forget Nicor offering a choice of five natural-gas suppliers? (“Well, dear, I’ve just returned from a 10-day trip examining all their pipelines, and I think we should go with Flames R Us.”)
Cable is the easy choice. It’s already installed, and who likes change? But it doesn’t have Turner Classic Movies or TV Land. It doesn’t have ESPN Classic or the old cartoons on Boomerang. (For deep thinking, please peruse the op-ed page.) To get those marvels, you have to upgrade to digital cable–which still doesn’t have the National Hockey League package. Or you switch to dish. The dish people are making enough money to run full-page ads in this paper each day. But the ads are never the same. One day, everything’s free. The next day, the rebates change. So, if you take the installation fee, subtract the rebate, and multiply the local channels by the square root of the monthly contract, and that equals . . . more choices than any rational person wants to spend their free time making.
Women know this. That’s why the fastest-growing magazine is the 2-year-old Real Simple from Time Warner. Its circulation hit 1.2 million this month. It’s making the Woman’s Day and Family Circle crowd look lethargic and Luddite. The managing editor is former Chicagoan Carrie Tuhy. She thinks the cable-versus-dish dilemma is a sex-specific hoot and laughs. A bit too long. But she says the theme of the magazine last year was “doing what needs to be done so we can get to what we want to do.”
“Part of what Real Simple is about is doing that legwork for you,” she said. No, they haven’t done a cable-dish breakdown amid the quick gourmet recipes and the likes of “How to conquer your clutter” and “Easy ways to organize your photos.” But she says those questions are being asked every day by people wrestling with priorities. Especially since Sept. 11. (Tuhy lives right by ground zero.)
“People have so many choices,” she said. “The world has gotten so much more complicated. People need someone to be their personal navigator.”
Closer to home, there are landmarks offering quiet direction–the neighbors on one side dumped cable and now just watch videos and get their news from National Public Radio. The neighbors on the other side cling resiliently to their antenna. Cable, dish, antenna or videos? Sigh. More choices.
Going the distance
Mike and Linda Lenich of South Holland will not make the decision for me. But they do tell how they simplified their lives. They’re part of a voluntary simplicity group that meets once a month at St. Pat’s Church in Chicago. Eleven years ago, they heard about a publication called Tightwad Gazette. That led them to the publication “Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence.” Well, that’s what they did. They started recording their spending and tightened their belts.
“We began making wiser choices and began to have more fun in life,” Mike said. “It wasn’t just reducing our expenses–it was uncovering who we really are,” added Linda.
They stopped going to expensive concerts. Mike picked up his guitar, and they went to song circles in people’s homes. They traveled to Europe in the off-season. “Paris is just as beautiful in winter,” Linda said.
They got out from in front of the TV and started walking. They canceled their magazine subscriptions (thankfully, they said nothing about newspaper subscriptions). They walk a couple of miles to the library, which neatly files its magazines, videos, books and CDs so Mike and Linda don’t have to clutter their home. Because they were walking so much, they canceled their health club membership.
“I thought we’d go off and live in the hills,” Mike said. “But South Holland’s one of the best-kept secrets around. It’s kind of nice to be able to live in your community instead of just sleep there at night.”
Scott Savage did go off and live in the hills out in southeast Ohio. He and his family do not even have a radio, though they read newspapers and magazines. And he thinks the Internet has some limited usefulness as a research tool. He became a devout Quaker and has written and edited two books, “The Plain Reader” and “A Plain Life.” Both had roots in Plain magazine, an acclaimed periodical Savage closed down earlier this year because it was taking up too much time. He farms and teaches history at a nearby college in Ohio. He traded his car for a horse and buggy. But before he gets around to the cable-dish question, he whacks my thinking about simplicity itself.
“Choosing simple living for one’s personal life improvement is actually completely within the culture of self that we live in,” he said. “It’s just a different lifestyle choice on the cafeteria line of abundance.”
But even if you begin the quest for selfish reasons, Savage said, “you’re bound to be affected because there’s a real world out there.”
Savage’s real world involves hearing the voices of his wife and children rise in song without competing with talk shows, working at building strong friendships and community, serving God, and being that “personal navigator” that Tuhy talked about for the pilgrims who have read his work.
No TV at all?
Oh, and the TV–cable, dish, antenna, videos?
“You’ve got to get rid of the TV,” he said. “Not for a week–spend a month with no media. If you do that, everything will seem different. It will make you tremendously uncomfortable. But you will begin to notice after a while what you’re missing and lacking in life. I can’t think of a more powerful lever than to start by turning the TV off.”
Any other life changes would just be window dressing, he said. Well, actually, what he said was, “Everything else is just Martha Stewart.” (For a guy who doesn’t watch TV, he’s pretty sharp.) So now, the question is cable versus dish versus antenna versus videos versus nothing.
See, even the simple questions keep getting harder.
