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I found the posting while surfing the Internet: It was a photograph of a lavishly serene cabin shaded by a luscious forest and fronted by white sand and clear blue waters. It looked like an upscale "Gilligan's Island."
The caption asked, "Would you live here without TV or Internet for a year for $1 million?"
Sadly, the posting appears to be a rhetorical question. Otherwise, I'd be roughly 365 days away from a million dollars.
I glanced at the comments section of the posting. A couple people offered to run away to the cabin for free. I suspect there's a fleet of affluent folks who would pay $1 million to escape there for a year without TV or Internet -- and probably toss in another million to get rid of the phone, too.
I used to live at a place without TV or Internet. I was a kid, and the location was called home.
We survived this deprived existence with weird devices such as "books" and "baseballs" and "imagination." Except I don't remember feeling either deprived or struggling.
Oh, I missed the TV. I was addicted to the black-and-white set with the cantankerous vertical hold knob. Left unsupervised, I'd have parked myself in front of the tube until the test pattern came up when the last of four stations signed off the air for the night.
It was a wise move when my parents ditched the set. At first, I couldn't figure out what that strange glow was outside. "It's sunlight," my parents said. "Go play in it."
The very first time "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" aired, our neighbor Gordon took us across the road to his house to watch it. When Neil Armstrong took his one small step on the moon for man, we watched it in color at Grandma's house. Mostly I stopped wasting so much time.
Now that I'm grown, I have a TV but no cable and lousy analog converter box reception. My blood pressure boiled as the picture constantly pixelated or froze on critical third-down plays. Once I turned off the set for good, peace of mind returned.
Now I need to go and do thou likewise with my cellphone. A decade ago, I bragged that I was one of the two last people in America without a cellphone. I didn't want to be that connected.
"There are places a guy needs to go, such as the bathroom, where he just doesn't want to be that accessible," I said then.
Now I not only have a cellphone, it's a smartphone chock full of texting, streaming and practically sparking with connectivity. I catch myself pausing on my way to the bathroom to pick up my phone. It's insane!
Someone needs to snatch the electronic devices out of most of our hands and say, "Look, there's sunlight. Go play in it."
So I'm ready to turn off, tune out, and drop in to this wonderful island cabin without TV and Internet. I've got a whole pile of books I've been waiting to read. And I suspect my productivity would skyrocket 1,200 percent if I wasn't trolling Facebook when I was supposed to be writing.
Of course, once I got back from the island, I'd flop down in front of a connected TV to watch a football game. Or possibly a few dozen episodes of "Gilligan's Island." I wouldn't want to rush back into high-tech society with my bliss and million bucks all at once.
— While he's still connected, write Cole at burtseyeview@tribtoday.com, or find him wasting time on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.