Lauren Shmill was tired of waking up early, getting in her car, and driving down to the yoga studio every day. Every meditation class felt too complicated, and paying for a membership gave her more stress than before she started.
One day, as she was watching Grey’s Anatomy, Lauren noticed that the feelings she gets in yoga class were starting to bubble up to the surface. Her eyes went into soft focus and her mind went blank. Hardly blinking, and not thinking about anything, Lauren realized that she could skip those classes and get some “tune out juice” right from her own living room.
“Why didn’t I think of this before?” said Lauren, while she furiously skipped through the channels. She needed to discover exactly the right TV show to fill the void…but not all of it. Just enough so that her brain feels like it’s being entertained, but without really consuming or thinking about anything.
Finally, she found the perfect channel. Discovery. The mindless consumption of irrelevant information was the secret formula to a full episode’s worth of dissociation fodder. She could zone out to the melodic tones of the most granola person she’d ever seen telling her how to build a treehouse. She could watch a guy go fishing, a sport that is known to be long and boring but is for some reason televised. She could forget about how her personal choices lead her to have so much difficulty everyday.
Lauren thought she’d mastered enlightenment after marathoning “Cabela’s Collegiate Bass Fishing,” but then she came across an ad for Discovery’s sister channel, HGTV. Lauren quickly grabbed her remote, switched to HGTV, and immediately felt waves of transcendence. A whole community was there to help her find peace- The Property Brothers, power couples galore, and even celebrity guests that don’t actually do any of the manual or creative work. And oh, the joy of all of the pointless shows that don’t have to exist! Rich people giving themselves bigger and fancier houses kept her brain humming like a bird.*
*Be careful, you might have opinions on foyers if you choose this form of mediation.
Lauren has now begun her own business connecting people to the channel that best fits their needs. She wants people to stop wasting time and money going to a studio, and just stay put in their living room. She also says the couch is the best place to start tuning out the rest of the world. Her business motto is “Your path to inner peace is included in your cable package.”
