It could have been often said that the 1st step to becoming a better investor is an easy one — turn off the Television.

Top financial channel — and its competitors — will simply cause you to become dumber as well as poorer.

This comes like a surprise to many. After all, financial channels offer a gentle stream of well-credentialed professionals, men and women with extraordinary titles from major companies. The majority have PhDs, years of experience, or manage huge sums of money. They look good. They look sharp. They have insightful thoughts plus reams of arcane investment data tripping off their tongues.

How might following  them possibly turn you into a worse investor?

Since the unstated premise behind these programs — that exist, of course, on the way to sell advertising — is that people must be in a near-constant position of reaction:

“The market is hitting a new high today. What must traders do at this time?”

“The Fed has left interest rates unchanged. What must investors do at the moment?

“GNP was up an unexpectedly strong 3.8 percentage previous quarter. What must investors do at the moment?”

They make on an analyst with a bullish view and another with a bearish one — on shares, bonds, currencies, commodities, rates of interest, or the economy — allow them to square off for a couple of minutes, followed by cut to commercials. After sometime later, they come back and do it some more. This goes on every day, every week, every year.

Why do a lot of brilliant, talented, educated people spend countless hours staring blankly at the tube?

The quick answer, certainly, is we like it.

But can we, actually? Is watching TV more fulfilling than what you would be doing if you were not?

If you get particular about it, you might feel slightly ridiculous. As an example, have you ever told yourself something like: Gee, I actually need to find more exercise, but Dancing With the Stars is on in ten minutes. I promised my daughter I’d educate her how to play chess, but these Seinfeld re-runs are very funny. It is long past time I stopped in to visit my getting old grandmother, but I can not miss the playoffs! I promised myself I’d figure out how to play the piano this time, but this week is the finals of American Idol. I really do wish to plant that garden. However I can’t miss my soaps. If we’re challenged, certainly, we have lots of rationalizations.

Let a TV critic inform you that most of the programming is mindless scrap and you will point to the educational stuff on The History Channel, Discovery, or National Geographic, even if that’s only a part of what you watch.

If he replies that you’re still being subjected to hours of commercials each week, you inform him you tape the programs and fast-forward through them.

If he counters that taping only enables you to use more TV, you’ll for all time play your trump card: “Mind your own business.”

After all, you’re an adult. It is your life to survive. You can still spend it any way you want.

However, between South Park and Grey’s Anatomy, do you ever reflect on how you’re spending it?

Regardless how good the programming is — and let’s face it, some of it is great — or else how rapidly you fast-forward through the commercials, the hours you spend in front of the tube is time you haven’t used up pursuing your objectives, living out your dreams, or just interacting with another human being. If you’re elderly and companionless — or housebound for some other cause — that is different. But that doesn’t describe the majority of us.

Twenty-five years before, Neil Postman warned of our consuming love affair with TV in Amusing Ourselves to Death. In the book — a jeremiad about the danger of turning serious conversations about politics, business, religion, and science into entertainment packages — he argues that TV is generating not the dystopia of George Orwell’s 1984 but rather of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World:

“Spiritual devastation is more likely to appear from an enemy that has a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother will not observe us, by his choice. We tend to watch him, by ours. There is no require for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population gets distracted by trivia, while cultural life is redefined like a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public talk gets a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk.”

He concludes that we’d all be improved off if TV got worse, not better.

As per A.C. Nielsen, 99 percent of American households use a television set. Two-thirds own over 3. These sets are on an average of six hours and 47 minutes every day.

Forty-nine percentage of Americans polled say they spend a lot of time in front of the Television. It isn’t difficult to find out why. The average viewer watches at least four hours of TV each day. That is two months of non-stop TV-watching per year. Within a 65-year life, one could have spent nine years glued towards the tube.

You by now know how little you’ll gain by watching a lot Television. But have you as well considered what it will be costing you?

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