Get rid of your streaming service

Life was better without it.

I was surprised this week to learn that, according to Nielsen, streaming consumption recently crossed that of cable; I was surprised because I assumed that people had begun watching more streaming than cable years and years ago. Who do you know that still watches cable all that much? Apparently there are enough people who do that streaming’s edge is incredibly small:

In July, streaming amounted to 34.8% in the share of total TV consumption, a growth of nearly 23% within the past year. Cable and broadcast viewership both dropped year over year, with the former amounting to 34.4% and the latter making up just 21.6%. Both fell around 10% compared to July 2021.

As an aside, I am just kind of fascinated as to how people could still be filling up 1/3 of their entire TV consumption with cable. What are they watching? Reruns of Shawshank Redemption on TNT? Whatever Giada is currently doing on Food Network? I can only assume cable is much the same as it’s ever been so I am not sure what people are still getting out of it, at least that they couldn’t get much more easily on streaming.

But here we come to the crux of the issue: You should actually cancel your streaming service. You know what, cancel cable, too, but if you have to do one of them, absolutely do streaming. It’s really quite an unpleasant technology, your life was better without it, and it will be better once you ditch it too.

In this space we have already advised you to get rid of your smartphone, so I suppose it may seem as if I’m urging you to simply get rid of all the things in your life that bring you material pleasure. But it’s sort of the opposite: These things, by-and-large, have decreased rather than increased our material enjoyment in life; they have cheapened certain things, and by extension they have cheapened us and the lives we live. It is better always for your life and the time you spend in it to be dear rather than cheap.

Streaming services are cheap. Quite literally so—when you pay Netflix $10 per month you get access to about half a decade’s worth of movies and television shows—but they’re figuratively cheap as well: They have cheapened movie- and TV-watching (what the analysts call “content consumption”) beyond even the historically mind-numbing habits engendered by cable television. Renting a movie, say, or going to see one in the theater—these were and are special and notable things, things that you do in a meaningful and notable way. The experiences of going to a video store, or a theater, are unique and lasting; you know how they feel, you can feel it in your bones, and it’s a good feeling, just a nice and fun thing to do. What does scrolling through Netflix or Hulu feel like? Just like that—scrolling. Swiping and clicking and flicking, just sort of doing it; it’s not fun or pleasant or anything much at all really. This is a declension.

That sort of loss could be justified if streaming itself contributed more meaningfully to your life. But let’s be real: It really doesn’t, not on balance. Be honest: How much of your streaming consumption is of things you have already seen—movies, television shows, whatever? I’d be willing to bet $20 that a sizable majority of what most people watch is just repeat viewings of stuff they’ve already watched at some point. People love to look at stuff they’ve already seen a bunch of times before. People will watch The Office end-to-end and start it over immediately. Billie Ellish once said she’d seen The Office 14 times total; it was streamed for a whopping 57 billion minutes in 2020 alone. Combine that sort of fixation with the old familiar movies a lot of people watch habitually and it would be fair to call streaming little more than a vehicle for nostalgia and familiarity.

There’s not necessarily anything wrong with a little of that in moderation, of course—but streaming doesn’t really encourage moderation. That’s the point. It encourages heavy, daily consumption, a nightly fixation, little room for much other recreation or relaxation. (“We’re competing with sleep on the margin,” Netflix’s CEO said a few years ago). Streaming is there to be immediately accessible at all times and to reward your brain with an easy hit of gratifying dopamine. That’s how they designed it.

You know what doesn’t work that way? DVDs. You could buy your favorite movies and television series on DVD for probably a couple of bucks a pop used (and not much more than that brand-new). That’s the better way to do home entertainment. The immediate obvious benefit is that you will always have these things in your possession and they can’t be taken away at the whims of a content director at a Los Gatos annex facility. The less-tangible yet more important benefit is that having this stuff on DVDs makes it modestly more difficult to access than just turning on a Roku box. That’s the sort of difficulty that creates a perfectly reasonable barrier to the overconsumption and imaginative stagnation that has become the hallmark of streaming.

Of course, many streaming services also offer original content—movies and TV shows—that can present new and unfamiliar stories for you to consume. Well, big whoop. Fully 99% of it is garbage—seriously—and the remaining 1% can be easily bought on DVD, too.

So what would you do with the extra time every day or evening that you wouldn’t be desultorily scrolling through Netflix or Hulu? Some ideas: Reading. Spending time with your spouse. Writing. Building something. Prepping for an excellent dinner the next night. Relaxing in some way other than watching something else on the television. Those are just a few of the exciting options available to you.

And if you feel the need to scroll through some sort of served-up content offering on television, well, there’s always television itself. Even if you’ve pulled the plug on cable too, there’s still plenty on broadcast television to divert your attention for a lazy evening. Public television in particular is a perfectly fine way to pass an hour or so; there are plenty of very interesting, non-political shows on there, from cooking to nature documentaries to travel shows to whatever, and all of them are more fun and gratifying than watching Parks and Rec for the fifth time or making it 42 minutes through Forrest Gump before you fall asleep.

Give it a shot. If you don’t like it, it’s very easy to sign back up again. But I think you’ll like it. And if you don’t like it, please don’t come complaining here—I really prefer to keep up the illusion that I’m always right.