Binge Watching

I did not know what to write this blog about so I asked my dad. He suggested writing about binge watching (while binge watching) and it’s negative effects. The suggestion was a welcome one and it immediately made me think of an anecdote I heard relating to more effectively binge watching. I’ll try and tie it all together.

Starting with binge watching. I don’t really watch shows myself but I see the appeal. I find it hard to commit to long seasons and envy those that do it with ease, I tend to stick to shorter forms of entertainment that in all probably make up a similar length of time. When my dad brought up binge watching he said he was interested in it because he wanted to know what progress someone could make if they halved their time binge watching and instead spent it in the gym or doing some other form of self improvement. I think the answer to this question isn’t incredibly nuanced, if you watch TV for two hours a day – a mark that isn’t uncommon nowadays – working out for an hour along with healthy eating habits would make you a very healthy person. I remember watching a video about Herschel Walker, a man mentioned next to Bo Jackson as arguably the greatest athlete in North American sports history. Going into his freshman year of high school Herschel Walker was a chubby, unathletic kid. As the legend goes, all he changed over the course of one summer were his TV watching habits. During commercial breaks he would do as many push ups and crunches as possible. As this number grew he increased the difficulty of the push ups and crunches but also the quantity – according to him he was doing around 10,000 push ups (I forget the number of crunches) just watching television. Granted his TV habits were absurd so he had a huge margin of time to focus on working out, though it begs the question how difficult these workouts were. After all, it was mixed with leisure time so it was something he clearly found easy to stay in schedule with. This non traditional sort of work ethic-hack lead him to immediately become one of the most athletic human beings on the planet,  binge watching on paper is one of the easiest adds to a schedule out of anything. You do nothing but get back the experience of one of your favorite shows. With the rise of audiobooks and things like the peloton there’s clearly a demand for the fusion of leisure and self improvement, however, I think no money needs to be spent on obtaining this combination. Read into your schedule, how hard would it be to incorporate a workout into a time typically meant for leisure and leisure alone. This is not to suggest that down time is not important, it is, but things like body weight exercises and walking or running are entirely scalable – something is better than nothing and even a minimal amount of work for the amount of time the average one of us spends on solely leisure would do a lot.

Work ethic is typically viewed in a very black and white way. Either you’re the type of person who dives head first at whatever you are asked to do or you do not and are labeled as lazy. Work ethic is valuable but perhaps equally as valuable is efficiency. I could work exceptionally hard at doing one task but no matter how hard I work, the person who puts in even mediocre effort while finding ways to innovate and make the most comfortable usage of their time will typically come out on top. I would hope that everyone at some point can find the benefit of fitness and good health, especially the clear headedness that comes with it. Brutish hard work is not always the only way to get into shape, rather an intelligently crafted schedule.