I Abandoned My TV Nearly Two Years Ago, Maybe You Should Too!
Dear Nyaaba ,
Nearly two years ago, I performed what looked like a small domestic rebellion but felt like an act of self-preservation: I switched off the television and never switched it back on. No valedictory ceremony. No minute of silence. Just a quiet withdrawal from a glowing altar that had begun to demand too much of my mind and too little of my conscience.
The modern news cycle is not merely informative; it is invasive. It does not knock. It storms the inner chambers of the psyche, boots first, trailing images of war, conflict, mayhem, and human cruelty—served raw, relentless, and without mercy. It is a daily parade of grief, broken bodies, shattered cities, and moral collapse, packaged as “updates,” normalized as background noise, and consumed between meals as though sanity were indestructible.
But sanity is not indestructible. It is a fragile ecology.
What unsettles the mind most is not even the horror—humanity has always known horror—but the mendacity that now walks openly, unashamed, dressed as policy, patriotism, or pragmatism. Lies no longer blush. Decency no longer clears its throat. Mores that once restrained our worst instincts have been ridiculed into irrelevance. Truth is no longer pursued; it is curated. Compassion is not absent by accident; it has been crowded out.
This is a dangerous potpourri: violence without pause, falsehood without consequence, and cruelty without apology. Taken together, they seep slowly into the soul, eroding the inner scaffolding that keeps a person upright. One begins to feel perpetually outraged yet strangely powerless; informed yet emotionally anaesthetized; awake yet inwardly exhausted. That is not awareness. That is psychological attrition.
Safeguarding one’s mental health, therefore, is no longer a luxury or an affectation of the sensitive. It is an ethical duty to oneself. To step back is not to be indifferent. It is to refuse the corrosion of the inner life. One can remain engaged with the world without allowing the world’s worst excesses to colonize the mind.
When I abandoned my television, silence returned—not an empty silence, but a restorative one. In that quiet, thought regained depth. Moral outrage regained proportion. Empathy stopped competing with spectacle. I could read, reflect, pray, argue with myself, and feel again without being bludgeoned into despair by a 24-hour carousel of calamity.
The mind, like the body, requires boundaries. You do not call it cowardice to avoid poisoned food; you call it wisdom. So too with poisoned narratives, ceaseless gore, and the normalization of indecency. There is nothing noble about consuming more misery than the soul can metabolize.
In an age that profits from our agitation and feeds on our fear, choosing mental hygiene is a radical act. Sometimes, the most responsible thing a person can do is to step away from the noise, tend to the garden of the mind, and refuse to let madness masquerade as normalcy.
I abandoned my TV nearly two years ago. What I reclaimed was not ignorance—but clarity.
Respectfully yours
Kasise Ricky Peprah
The Honourrebel Siriguboy
About Author
