Is it just me or does everyone on the face of the planet besides me have the ability to binge-watch? Whether it is an entire television show or a movie marathon, most people seem to be able to get through them with no problems at all. I simply do not understand why someone is able to get in one place or location and dedicate their lives to hours upon hours of entertaining content. It is baffling, and that is not even the half of it.

The act of watching a television show or movie is certainly a fun one. I love watching movies, starting a new television series I had not started yet, and sacrificing some of my time to activities such as those described previously. What I do not enjoy is spending hours (and I mean HOURS) of my time trying to finish what I started. There are television shows that always leave me wanting more, but I have enough discipline and patience to realize that I need to sleep and move around and do something completely different. Binge-watching anything takes too much of my time and effort.

A couple of years ago, I took a public speaking class. In that class we were required to do various speeches, monologues and what not. One of these assignments involved a continuous, twelve-minute long information session about any topic we wanted. This assignment was similar to that of a TED Talk. Ironically, the topic I chose was binge-watching. I have been enamored by this concept for years because there are some many variables involved in the actual process. For twelve straight minutes, I told my classmates about the many things to put into consideration when deciding to binge-watch a show. You have to choose when you want to watch something and for how long. The outfit you wear and the comfort level of said outfit come into play as well. You should be comfy if you are going to be sitting still for hours on end. I even calculated how much time it would take to watch an entire series. For example, there are seven seasons and one hundred and twenty-five episodes of the show “Parks and Recreation”. If you wanted to watch the entire series in succession, it would take you around 2,750 minutes or 45.8 hours or 1.9 days. It is unhealthy physically and mentally for a person to go through that. I LOVE “Parks and Recreation”, but I am not going to invest an entire couple of days to go through it.

If you are able to binge-watch, I applaud you. You have the mental strength and capacity to focus on one television or computer screen for hours and hours. That takes a certain amount of skill that I simply to not have. I am lucky if I am able to watch four or five episodes of a show in a single sitting. Perhaps I have this notion in my head that I can watch a whole variety of shows in this world and I do not have the patience to complete any of them. Do not get me wrong, I can occasionally get fixated on specific forms of entertainment (cough… YouTube videos… cough), but I feel as though that watching one thing for a long time starts to lose its touch after a while.