Giving Up Murder

I’ve decided to give up recreational murder as a pastime.

It just doesn’t seem appropriate or fun anymore.  It doesn’t fit into my lifestyle as a middle-aged yogi and mother.  It’s doesn’t feel terribly zen.  Now that I think about it, it never really jived with who I am as a human being.

It’s a wonder that I’ve spent so many hours (days? weeks? months?) of my life glued to nightly murder dramas on television.

Given a better choice, I would never have watched these shows in the first place.  I am not particularly interested in police, courtrooms, or forensics.  I’ve never chosen to read books about those subject matters.  When listing my hobbies and “areas or interest” on forms, I have never even considered writing recreational murder as a subject.

And yet, I’ve witnessed countless episodes of gruesome deaths in my own living room.  I justified the choice by saying there was nothing else on, or by appreciating the fine acting or writing behind the series, but ultimately, isn’t watching murder as a leisure activity a sick waste of time?

Brain research is clear that repeated exposure to violence desensitizes one to violence.  I am vigilant about guarding my children’s screen usage, but what about my own?  This doesn’t mean I feel prone to commit a murder just because I’ve watched it so often, but I am concerned about how my brain is affected by all this recreational homicide.  I often remark to my husband that I don’t understand why a character on a show wavers or feels guilty about killing someone in self-defense.

If someone was going to kill me or my family, I wouldn’t feel an ounce of regret if they died.  I wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger.

Ok.  That’s my opinion, but why in the world do I have an opinion about justifiable homicide?  Why have I spent time thinking about it?  Why do I express strong convictions about a subject which, thankfully, is very far from the norm in my simple life?

Besides that, it is not even a subject I find remotely interesting.

Ironically, it was television itself that made me think  about thing about what I watched for fun.  On an old episode of the Gilmore Girls, the adult daughter suggests that her mother watch TV to banish her boredom.  Her mother quips, I don’t find forensic science as fascinating as the rest of the world seems to.  It made me think.  I don’t find forensics fascinating either.  After the first time a CSI used luminal and black light to show blood, the gig was up.  There is nothing new, there is only, always more.

Don’t I have more worthy subjects to fill my time and my mind?

Besides desensitizing us to violence, television homicide does something else horrible to our brains.  It literally fills them with ideas and images of murder.  You see, although we can rationally walk our brains through the differences between reality and fiction, our brains don’t automatically distinguish between the two.  Our brains don’t even distinguish between our thoughts, dreams, and memories without making a conscious decision to do so.  That is why elite athletes use imagery to prepare for a big tournament; our brains can’t tell the difference between what we imagine happens and what actually happens.

Topping it all off, vision is our most dominant sense.  The images we carry from watching murder on television stay in our brains forever.  They connect and build neuropathways which strengthen each and every time we think of them or see a similar image.  We literally change the shape and function of our brains as we passively intake images of murder during primetime.

I am in the prime of my life right now.  It is time to think about how I spend my time.

Murder must go.