I bought a TV

People these days are skeptical towards getting Single Purpose Appliances, that is things that have only one function. In the good old days, you used your phones to call people, and your computers to work or play games. Now you could interchange those roles easily, you would work on your phone and call people from your laptop.

Another victim of this is the television. We have so much media consumption options now — Phones, Tablets, Laptops, or PCs, that it doesn’t make sense to buy a TV anymore. Yet, I did buy one today. I had always wanted a big flat-screen TV, and today I finally got it. And I have my reasoning for it.

In programming, we have this thing called the — Single Responsibility Principle. What it means that any small piece of code should only do one thing, and do it right. The moment you try to get it to do a lot, it will start messing up. I think the same can apply to our day to day life as well.

I use my laptop for work, for social media, WhatsApp as well as for watching movies and TV Shows. This means that whenever I am working, I always have the option to open up Netflix and watch an episode or go to Youtube for a quick break. But if I can segregate the responsibilities, so that the laptop is just for working, and the TV is for entertainment, that makes concentrating much easier.

And this is not just about work. Entertainment is now better as well. No longer will I be interrupted by a slack notification from a client while I am trying to enjoy a movie. Also, the TV is fixed in the living room, which means that there is now a separate dedicated space for entertainment.

Maybe all this makes sense, or maybe it’s just me trying to rationalize me buying an expensive shiny object that I probably could have lived without.