I like this Clay Shirkey piece about the time sink that is television:

Looking for the mouse

My wife and I gave up television shortly after the birth of our first daughter. We weren’t making any grand pronouncements or stating a preceived moral or intellectual superiority to the boob tube; we simply didn’t have time to watch.

When I look back on all the hours I wasted in front of a television in my life, I almost want to weep. Sure, I now have the necessary collective pop culutural framework to hang with folks of my peer group. I can make insider references to Gilligan at parties, crack up a room full of Wookie-hitters with my recollection of 70s toy commercials, and I sure as hell don’t regret naming my fish Brenda, Donna and Kelly.

But now I live in a country that had completely different TV shows. Even if they did have American shows here in Austria (cough, “Dallas”), the filter through which an Austrian viewed these shows has little in common with mine. I work in a multi-cultural environment. A cleveryly-worded diatribe about your hatred of Scrappy Doo in such a crowd (“But how is it a show without him? Scrappy is the adventure!”) doesn’t produce the same result as it might in, say, a fraternity house in Boulder (where it brought down the house).

Now that we have two children, the extra time we have from never watching television isn’t any more productive. We’re not authoring Wikipedia articles or devising some new method for getting insanely wealthy. But we are spending that time with our children and each other, which is pretty much what free time should be.