Why We Cancelled Netflix

You don’t consume Netflix, it consumes you.

More often than not, big things start off as smaller ones. A small boulder rolls down and carries snow with it and on its way down, turns into a great avalanche. If you look at Netflix, it is one of the best examples for something small which became something phenomenal just like an Avalanche. I feel this article does justice to the evolution of Netflix.

We got Netflix a couple years ago. We had never had it before. My wife and I said to each other, “Oh! What the heck, if we don’t like it we’ll cancel it after the free month!” I reckon the moment never came; not until recently at least.

So what changed you ask? Has the quality of shows and movies gone down? Has the cost of service gone up? What is it exactly? Well, I don’t know for sure. We do spend (read waste) a lot of time on it. We’ve watched countless shows and even more movies. They even have Bollywood movies on it so it was a win -win for us.

In the beginning of 2016, I made a personal resolution. I’d stop logging in to Facebook. Now Facebook is another avalanche story, no smaller than Netflix. But I noticed that I was getting swallowed by Facebook. All of my free time (which is all of the time I have), was being consumed entirely by Facebook. Note that this was the same year we got Netflix. So you could say that I filled my Facebook void with Netflix.

I feel there are a lot of distractions in today’s world. You could call them relax-aids or pastimes. I call them distractions. They distract us long enough to keep us from doing anything productive. Imagine this, if the creator of Netflix was busy binge watching Star Trek on his TV all day, would we even have a Netflix today? I don’t think so.

I feel we have to get rid of such distractions in order to make our minds more sensitive to thoughts and people. We’ve lost a lot of social intelligence due to technology. We also would have a lot more time to think (which is primarily the reason for our very existence) and solve problems. The creator of Netflix saw a problem. He solved not because he was watching TV, but because he had time to think of a way to solve the problem. If I want to solve a problem, I have to remove these distractions from my life.

In the last few months, I have picked up on my reading habit. I read a lot here on Medium, so every month I have to be careful to select my Member Preview articles to get the best out of the three free ones I can read without a membership. I also read a lot about personal growth and personal finance. I feel reading gives me a lot more peace and perspective. It makes me calm. I am not agitated like I used to be. And articles like these just make my day.

So, I guess you could say that I am off to more productive things. Maybe I will have my Netflix (figurative) one day too!