I get home and the TV is on before I have put anything down. I could not tell you what is playing. What is playing was never the point. I have lived like this for most of my life.
It runs while I eat. It runs while I shower. It is still on when I fall asleep.
What happens if you turn it off?
Try it tonight. You won’t last long.
The moment it goes quiet, something starts coming up in you. A feeling, a thought, something from years ago that never got settled. Facing it is painful, and tonight you would rather not.
So you reach for something to fill the quiet instead. I call this a self-prescription: a remedy you give yourself, with no doctor involved, so that you do not have to feel what would otherwise come up. There are many of these, and the television is the easiest to reach: nowhere to go, nothing to get ready, nobody to call. You press one button, and it keeps going on its own long after you have stopped paying attention.
If you had it on for the show, you would switch it off when the show ended. So the telling thing is not that you turn the TV on. It is that you keep it on — through meals, through the shower, into sleep — so the house is never quiet long enough for you to feel lonely or afraid, or for an old memory to surface.
What is the TV holding off?
The first thing is loneliness.
Look at older people who live by themselves. Their TV runs all day. Anyone who has visited a grandmother living alone knows what this is like: nobody is watching, and the sound never stops. It runs while she does the dishes. It runs while she is on the phone to someone else. When you arrive, she doesn’t turn it off; she turns it down. And when the talk goes quiet for a moment, the volume is back up before either of you has noticed.
If you ever ask her why it is always on, she says she gets bored.
But being bored means having nothing to do, and she keeps the TV on while she is doing the dishes and while she is talking on the phone. The sound is not there to fill empty time. It is there so the house sounds as if someone else is in it. When she says she is bored, she means she is lonely.
How I lived as a boy
I went to school and came home, and once I was home I did nothing but watch television. It was my only window on the world.
I had no friends. At school, the only conversation I could manage with the other kids was retelling whatever had been on TV the night before. For a while that worked: talking about last night’s episode was enough to keep me part of a group. That lasted only as long as the talk stayed on television. The moment it moved on to something else, I had nothing to say. I always saw my silence coming about four seconds before anyone else noticed it. So I kept steering the talk back to television, and I got good at it. But steering a conversation is not the same as taking part in it, and the others could tell the difference.
That may sound sociable, but it was a way of making sure the talk never turned to me. As long as we were discussing a TV show, I could stay in the group without anyone finding out what I felt, what I wanted, or what I was afraid of.
So loneliness, for me, had little to do with there being nobody around. There were people around — a whole school full of them. What I lacked was any idea how to turn one of them into a friend. That is something you learn while you are growing up, by getting it wrong many times in front of other people. I spent those years indoors with the TV on.
In front of the TV, nobody can hurt you
That is the second thing the TV holds off: fear.
Get close to a person, and sooner or later you will get hurt. Someone you like may not like you. You may be turned down, or merely tolerated, which is worse. So you go around holding your breath, checking faces, reading meaning into a silence that probably meant nothing.
And there is the effort. You buy the coffee. You remember what they told you last time and ask about it — which means that back then you were really listening, even though there was nothing in it for you. When somebody takes an interest in you, you return it, even on a day when you have nothing left to give. Relationships run on energy, and you are the one who has to keep supplying it.
A television asks for none of this. It entertains you without your doing anything, it never turns you down, and it does not leave until you switch it off. While it is on, you do not have to feel how lonely you are, or how afraid. You get something that feels a little like company, without ever having to show anything of yourself, sit through an awkward moment, or find out whether anyone actually wants to be close to you.
Think of the small lift you get when somebody looks up as you come in, or says your name, or laughs along with you half a second after you start. It tells you that someone has noticed you. A television never gives you that. Nobody on the screen knows there is anyone in the room. The sound fills the silence, but not your need for another person. That is why four hours of it leaves you exactly as lonely as when you started, and four hours older.
And then it gets worse
Spend long enough with a television for company, and problems start to show up in your relationships with real people.
Of course they do. Being with people is learned by doing, and you weren’t doing it. So conversations start going wrong in small ways — a pause you don’t know how to fill, a joke that lands oddly and sits there, an invitation you answer half a beat too slowly so that it sounds like a no.
You would never mention any of this to anyone. You would just rather not go through an evening like that again for a while. Then the while gets longer.
An evening at home feels safer, because nothing can go wrong in it. But every evening you stay away is practice you miss, and practice is what makes talking to people easier. So the next invitation feels a little harder, staying home looks a little better, and around it goes.
The TV itself is not what harms you. The trouble is that it is very good at keeping you from feeling lonely or afraid. The alternative to the TV, being with real people, is hard, and for a long time it gives little back before it gets easier.
The TV still goes on when I come in
It does. That hasn’t changed much.
What has changed is that some nights I turn it off and just sit there. When the sound stops, the feelings I spent all those years avoiding are right where they were: the loneliness, the fear of people. Decades later, neither has gone anywhere.
Usually I end up turning it back on. The difference is that now, before I do, I stop for a moment and notice that they are still there. I never used to do even that.
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Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board