I gave up watching TV about a year and half ago now. At the time I used to sleep with the TV on most of the night. The drone of Jay Leno and the utterly annoying cackle of Conan O’brien would be the last thing I heard while I dozed into a stupor, only to awake at some point in the middle of the night or early morning to turn the TV off. Certainly not the way I’d like to fall asleep, but hey, it was how it was for a while since the TV was the only source of faking life in my environment.

The reason I gave up TV was because I told myself that this was unhealthy and I should start forcing myself to go out more. So one fine day when I returned from a trip home to find that my TV have been conveniently relocated to the office in my absence for use with the video-conferencing unit, I was relieved in a way. My co-workers had helped me take the first step in something I was contemplating, but hadn’t done yet.

I successfully spent the next several months — till last month in fact without watching TV (except for a couple of days of CNN at the time of the Columbia disaster). But then I finally gave in and decided to go buy an antenna so I can re-educate myself on the pop-culture that is telivision — it’s off to hear people talking about shows that I have never heard of, let alone spent any time watching.

So now, a couple of weeks later, I’m surprised at what happened to TV in the past year and half. Every show on TV is some twist on a reality show or a game show or some combination of the two. Whether it is Last Comic Standing, American Junior, Fear Factor (and those are just the names I remember… I don’t even remember the ones for the various shows with guys trying to pick out girls and vice versa or the reality version of homicide), every show on TV sems to have the same theme — reality TV meets gameshow.

What’s really happening here? Our lives are enough of a competition anyway. For everything. For every little thing. And yes, I — a otherwise highly competitive person — am getting a little sick of it all. TV used to be a refuge — a refuge from reality. Where things were funny, made up and just for laughs. Now, the laughs come from watching one group of people gang up on and be nasty towards others. Competition has gone from being healthy competition to being humiliation. Do we really get our kicks from humiliation?

And the whole obsession with Reality TV — pioneered by MTV but now so omnipresent that you cannot escape it. Get with the program folks — it is NOT freaking REAL. It is still “made up” and directed. The rules are contrived to make people fight with each other and to create explosive situation, because that is what sells. It is not real. And what you see is the edited version so that it is hot, spicy and exciting. It is fake. It is worse than fake — because it’s brought to you under the garb of being real.

I don’t know about you, but I certainly want a break from the competition, a break from the facades and a break from the fake-reality. I guess I just want the real fake.