The Low-Low Price of Free Will

A tearless goodbye to television

The first thing to do is admit that I’m deranged. This Bagel Manifesto mostly is driven by my struggle with cultural shifts. At its heart is my longstanding beef with toasted bagels. Most of you toast your bagels, and you’re still good people. I sometimes toast my bagel. I don’t begrudge the toasting so much as what it implies, which is that the bagel is stale.

Toasting a day-old bagel makes it edible. In the case of chain-store bagels, it also hides how abominably shitty they are. These are objective facts. If it offends your chain loyalty, please consider ordering one not toasted next time. If you feel as if you got your money’s worth, let me know.

People eat all sorts of things I don’t like. I eat things they don’t like. I honestly don’t begrudge aesthetics when it comes to food. There’s no need to get furious about it.

Except.

Since everyone asks to have their bagels toasted, bagel places have lost any incentive to make superior bagels or, indeed, to throw out day-old bagels. Instead, they toast them and serve them to you because they hate you and think you’re stupid. Or, to put it less pejoratively, they’re cheap and know they can get away with it.

They get away with it because a toasted bagel tastes essentially the same whether it is a few hours old or a full day old. I think it is fundamentally unfair to charge people full price for garbage. I guess that’s why I’m not successful in business. Still, I don’t really have a right to complain.

But.

Since I don’t get my bagels toasted, I occasionally am forced to eat a stale bagel. When I drive away from a place only to find out they stuck me with a stale bagel, it ruins my week. So much so that I don’t buy bagels anymore, which is too bad because they’re one of my favorite foods.

So the big-picture idea, the struggle I’ve assigned myself, is learning to accept that I have to learn to do without when I lose, which means trying not to whine about it once the people have spoken.

A Television Manifesto

That was a long but necessary preface to explain my disappointment with “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.” I am the age and demographic that kind of worships Weird Al. He is a bright, kind, open individual according to every account from everyone who has ever dealt with him. I had really high hopes for the mocu-bio-pic. So much so that I was willing to pay to subscribe to Roku as soon as the movie was available. I was ignorant enough to believe it was a free trial of some sort. When the commercials started about 20 minutes in I turned off the TV and had an existential crisis.

My first realization was that I couldn’t buy the movie anywhere at any price. That is the worst part of all. The cost of watching the movie was enduring the commercials, and that cost was too high. I do not watch commercials.

I am old enough to remember the promise of cable. The idea was that you paid for cable, they didn’t have to sell advertising, and you could watch movies unbroken. Television without commercials, even in the late 1970s, appealed to me on a gut level. By the time my family got cable in the 1980s, that just wasn’t the case. You could pay more for “Premium” stations that didn’t have, like, car commercials, but they still ran commercials for themselves, trying to get people watching in hotel rooms to go home and subscribe, I suppose.

I haven’t had cable in this house in nearly 20 years. Like eating stale bagels, I get that most people would rather watch commercials than do without their shows. With the rise of streaming and the cord-cutting that followed I genuinely thought I could live a commercial-free existence. “Weird” reminded me that there’s no such thing.

What I see, and what makes me sound like a madman when I talk about it, is the slow slide into all ads all the time. I remember for a while they were selling DVDs that forced you to watch commercials before the movie that you paid for. No skipping, only fast-forwarding. It bothered me that there wasn’t rioting in the streets.

As with garbage bagels, everyone decided it was fine that companies hijacked your TV and forced you to watch the same commercial in perpetuity. I have a movie somewhere that autoplays an ad for the forthcoming Mission: Impossible III.

I don’t imagine anyone is trying to spite me, but it is a peek over the wall at what people will endure without comment.

Commercials are insults to our time and intelligence. Not being able to opt out, though, being forced to watch ads even when we’re willing to pay to not watch them is an affront to our free will. That is what gets me, the low-low price of human agency when faced with having television withheld.

I realize that the fact that having to do without infuriates me, also seems to implicate me, but think of it this way: If I pay for a fresh bagel and get a stale one, it’s cause to be annoyed. Similarly, if I buy a movie but I’m not allowed to watch it without enduring a commercial I’m justified in my anger.

It has become easier to not buy the bagel or the movie, save the money, and cut out the middleman. Not being able to buy what I want, though, sticks in my craw.

I won’t miss television. Disney bought a lot of the shows that I like anyway. I went a decade or so without watching and was better for it. Television has become like bagels for me, something I genuinely enjoy and know I will miss, but the potential aggravation isn’t worth the potential enjoyment. I feel like free will is kind of a muscle that easily can atrophy. Plus, there are an insane number of books I’d like to read before I die. From that perspective, watching ethnically-balanced, focus-group-friendly families cooing over their Ford Fiesta really is too high a price for me to pay.

Keep the Faith,

Tony

Postscript

Speaking of too high a price to pay, I’ve moved most of the way off social media, not that anyone would notice.

Except for sharing my writing, I long ago abandoned Facebook. I stayed with Twitter as long as I could. The final straw was when Elon Musk promised to bury accounts that didn’t pay. I don’t wanna harp, but free speech absolutism that’s only for people who are willing to pay feels strange. That is a Bagel Manifesto situation if I’ve ever heard of one. Elon Musk doesn’t owe me Twitter anymore than Disney owes me Dr. Who. I, in return, don’t owe them anything either. It’s OK.

I’ve moved my self-indulgence here to Substack. They have a chat feature where we can talk if you’re interested. I’ll be doing more short-form stuff there. You have to download the app, which I know is a pain. Here’s what it looks like, though:

If you want to respond to this email instead or comment below on the post to start a conversation, that would be cool. I won’t ignore you and no one can bury your posts here.

I’m on BeRe.al which is so much fun so far. It randomly asks you to take a photo of where you are and what you’re doing once per day. This Vice article describes it as well as I’ve seen.