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Movie Time

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Movie Time
The count is in! 407 titles.

Movie Time

This weeks article continues to build upon the major theme of our previous newsletter: the recapturing of time. Time is the one finite resource that matters. Remember from last week, "we become what we surround ourselves with." How we use our time determines our experience. Fortunately, there is a ton of time to be recaptured back into our hands through the low hanging fruit, that is, Entertainment Screen Time. Time is always in season so lets go harvest!

James, finally, takes the time to organize his VHS collection.

Entertainment Screen Time (A Simple Audit)

I have 407 movies that I organized into the shelving system I created. I love watching a good movie, especially during inclement weather. At the end of the day, however, Movie watching can easily eat up lots of time. Let's just say the average movie is 2 hours long. If you watched one movie per day that would be (2 x 365) 735 hours of time or 1/12th of the year. At this rate, every 12 years, you will have watched a years worth of movies. But in actuality, the time consumption is far greater than this.

Upon Closer Examination

Let's say you sleep 8 hours per night and work a 40 hour workweek. This leaves 16 hours per day of awake time (5840 hours per year). Let's subtract the 2080 hours of working time per year from your awake time.  This leaves you with 3760 hours of unallocated time.

735 / 3760 = .195 or ~ 20% of your awake time or 20% of your year is being dedicated to movie time.

Meaning, for every 5 years in this lifestyle, 1 of those years of free time is tied up solely in Entertainment Screen Time.

"Most of us are chained to screen time. I've been one of them."

What if cutting 2 hours of Entertainment Screen Time from your daily life gave you a 20% increase in time available for reaching a goal you have?

How We Broke the Chains

  • "Awareness, Awareness, Awareness!" exclaimed Anthony De Mello. To break the chains we have to our movie time, we need to understand our relationship to it. A great place to start is doing an audit of your time spent watching screens.
So many of us watch screens just to "Kill Time," but then turn around and wonder why we have no time to get things done. Audit your time and enlighten yourself to where it is spent.
  • Less is More: The less time we spend watching movies, the more we appreciate them when we do. Choosing 1 night a week to be movie night can break those time shackles instantly while simultaneously enhancing the movie watching experience.
  • Cut the Cord Cold: How many streaming services are you paying your time and money to? This is a tough one but think about it for a moment. Spending your Time and Money for something you don't own at the end of the day? If time is money, which is hard to argue against, then in paying for premium video services you are actually double spending. OOOFDAH!

Why VHS at Strand Farm?

  1. Accessibility - Off-grid friendly (with electricity generator). We need only walk to our shed to get a movie. We don't depend on internet/phone service for access.
  2. Cost - Most VHS movies can be found for under a dollar a movie. Last year in Idaho, we were paying 30 cents per pound of movies. At Goodwill they are 2 for a dollar.
  3. Quality - VHS tapes are hardy things, most of my tapes are between 25-40 years old and still play extremely well. I can't say this enough- they just don't make movies like they used to. Real stunt men, interesting plots, on location, interesting dialogue, life lessons, I could go on forever.
  4. No Changes - If you are paying attention to the world around you, there is a massive push to modify old movies so that they are more "up to date." By owning old VHS movies, you keep the movie as it was originally designed.
  5. Ambiance - If you grew up with VHS then you will understand this one immediately. Next.
  6. No ads - Old previews are a gem! If you wanna skip them, simply fast forward to start the movie and finish it all the way to the end without 3rd party injected commercial breaks.
  7. Limited Binge - Yes, I can power through the Back to the Future collection, but for the most part, having VHS movies prevents binge watching. There is no auto-start of the next movie. When we had streaming video services, binge watching utterly devoured our free time.