This Holiday Season, I’m Grateful for My Television
How I learned to stop complaining and love technology
Last weekend, I bought a new TV. A massive, room-dominating, relationship-damaging TV. It sits in the corner, like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey turned to landscape mode, with me as one of the chimps, braying at it and chucking the remote into the air. At its narrowest, the TV is less than half an inch, with a bevel so small I can’t lift it without getting fingerprints on the screen. To me it is a wonder from the future. It runs apps, so many apps, it can stream from anything, and it has Apple TV built into it. It’s 4K and so sharp that all I want to do is watch screen savers of rippling water. When I turn it on, it responds immediately with a beautiful HBO-style wipe, and a musical tone signaling hope and excitement.
There’s a peculiar happiness that comes from buying a new TV. Mine isn’t even a top of the range model. In the shop, I walked past curved, 8K, 80-inch, OLED models all blasting out HDR lumens galore to the dingy back of the shop where they’d shoved the budget kitchen TVs. There was mine, tucked under a flickering halogen light with a “reduced to clear” sticker attached to the side.
