Does Going Green Mean We Throw Away Our Remotes?

Here's a confession: I'm old enough to remember when life was just fine without microwave ovens, cell phones, beepers, fax machines, computers, and cable TV (even color TV wasn't a given back then). We had no palm pilots, one-hour photo shops, and everything wasn't available via drive-thru. If you had a car, chances are it didn't come with AC, power steering, power brakes, power windows, or power doors. It definitely did not talk back to you.

I don't recall having an air conditioner in my apartment until I was at least 9 or 10. No SUV, GPS, ATM, VCR, DVD, USB--not even a remote control. Yeah, we actually got up off our butts to change the channel or the volume on our TV sets. Considering that the average post-modern American couch potato watches three hours and 46 minutes of television every day (the equivalent of 52 consecutive, non-stop TV-watching days a year), I'm proposing a hot new ironic trend: the remote-less life.

By the time your typical kid in America graduates high school, he or she has sat through 360,000 television commercials and by age 65, they will have spent 9 years watching TV. It is probably obvious that this means a lot of energy consumed, a lot of coal burned, a lot of weight gained, basically a lot of impact on the planet.

It took a long time--and an awful lot of marketing--to make this happen. Reversing such a trend requires time and stamina--but, like any journey, it starts with a first step and here it is: Throw away your remote.