It could have been often said that the 1st step to becoming a better investor is an easy one — put off the Television.

Top financial channel — as well as its competitors — will only cause you to dumber as well as poorer.

This arrives like a surprise to many. After all, financial channels present a gentle stream of well-credentialed professionals, people with outstanding titles from prestigious firms. Most hold PhDs, years of practice, or manage huge sums of funds. They give the impression of being good. They appear sharp. They’ve got insightful ideas plus reams of arcane investment data tripping off their tongues.

How can following to them perhaps make you a poorer investor?

Because the unstated premise behind these shows — which exist, certainly, to sell advertising — is that investors is required to be in a near-constant position 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 should investors do now?

“GNP was up an unexpectedly strong 3.8 percentage previous quarter. What must investors do at the moment?”

They make on an analyst with a bullish view and another with a bearish one — on shares, bonds, currencies, commodities, rates of interest, or the economy — allow them to square off for a couple of minutes, followed by cut to commercials. After sometime later, they come back and do it some more. This goes on every day, every week, every year.

Why do a lot of brilliant, talented, educated people spend countless hours staring blankly at the tube?

The small reply, not surprisingly, is we like it.

But can we, really? Is watching TV more fulfilling than what you’d be doing if you weren’t?

If you get particular about it, you might feel slightly ridiculous. As an example, have you ever told yourself something like: Gee, I actually need to find more exercise, but Dancing With the Stars is on in ten minutes. I promised my daughter I’d educate her how to play chess, but these Seinfeld re-runs are very funny. It is long past time I stopped in to visit my getting old grandmother, but I can not miss the playoffs! I promised myself I’d figure out how to play the piano this time, but this week is the finals of American Idol. I really do wish to plant that garden. However I can’t miss my soaps. If we’re challenged, certainly, we have lots of rationalizations.

Let a TV critic inform you that most of the programming is mindless scrap and you will point to the educational stuff on The History Channel, Discovery, or National Geographic, even if that’s only a part of what you watch.

If he replies that you are still being subjected to hours of commercials each week, you tell him you tape the shows and fast-forward through them.

If he counters that taping only lets you consume more television, you can always play your trump card: “Mind your business.”

After all, you’re an adult. It is your life to survive. You can still spend it any way you want.

However, between South Park and Grey’s Anatomy, do you ever reflect on how you’re spending it?

No matter how nice the programming is — and let’s face it, some of it is great — or else how rapidly you fast-forward from your commercials, the time you use before the tube is time you have not spent pursuing your objectives, living out your goals, or just interacting with another human being. If you’re aged 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 does not look at us, by his option. We tend to watch him, by ours. There is no require for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a people becomes distracted by trivia, while cultural life is redefined like a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public talk will become a type 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 improved 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 by now know how little you’ll gain by watching a lot Television. But have you as well considered what it will be costing you?

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