the tv was not as much but grandma was a radio girl and even if the tv was on shed have the radio on … but I can’t sit in a totally empty/quiet house
I’m the same way but with people who MUST have the radio on at all times when driving either listening to music or the news. If it’s a long boring drive then yes I understand but don’t turn on music at full blast THEN try to talk to me the entire time.
I prefer music. TV is off unless I’m actually watching a show.
I never understood sleeping with a tv on. Sometimes I’ll doze off watching a show. The tv eventually wakes me up.
I’m with you. But keep in mind that for them, not having the TV on might make them nervous.
It absolutely does make them nervous as does any conversation that’s not about the weather, or TV.
I detest the sound of TV that I’m not actually watching, so much so that my husband (who’s MUCH more of a TV/movie person) generally wears headphones. As he’s going slightly deaf it actually works well for both of us.
That same noise aversion applies too to videos in the phone or ipad when we’re in bed. I cannot read with some stupid Buzzfeed video yammering next to me.
Headphones are a godsend!
I live alone and I don’t have cable TV, just Roku. I get only a handful of stations OTA. I never have the TV on in the background with any actual programs or (God forbid) talking. Sometimes I leave the TV on YouTube for music (there are a zillion music options!). Or, like right now, when I first get up and I’m checking my calendar, email, online newspapers, the Dope, etc., I put it on this YouTube channel:
There are currently 108 live web cams (occasionally they’ll add to that) all over the world and the channel cycles through them constantly, spending about 10 seconds on each one. Some innocuous jazz plays in the background. The station is mesmerizing. I’ve been watching it from time to time over many months, and I’ve seen the seasons change, Christmas decorations go up (on people’s boats, as well as in public plazas) and come down, skiers, ice skating, beach walkers, shoppers.
I’ve gotten familiar with most of the settings, and I like checking in and seeing what’s going on at that bar in St. John’s, that canal in Ft. Lauderdale, that snowy street in Breckenridge, Colorado, or that beach in Thailand. There are some wildlife cams, one in a desert in Namibia, one in a forest in Denmark, one in a place called Fox Haven in Ireland, a “deer pantry” (feeding trough) in Maine, one by a stork nest in somewhere…I forget. There are also occasional shots from the International Space station. They’re not in any particular order, geographically, i.e., the locations jump all over the globe, but they are numbered and stay in numerical order. I watched it for months before I noticed the numbers. 
Over the past couple of minutes…Switzerland, US Virgin Islands, Frankfurt Germany, an airfield in Greenland, Pyrenees ski resort, Zero Point Levi Finland, Sydney Australia, Venice Beach California, Duluth Minnesota canal, the Brooklyn Bridge, Jackson Hole Wyoming, Mt. Fuji, Gangnam S. Korea, Leland Michigan waterfront cafe, a street in DaNang Vietnam, Deerfield Beach Florida, Hawaii, Romania, Venice… sunny weather, blizzard, fog, waves lapping distant shores, the George Washington Bridge crammed with traffic, a crowded street in Tokyo…I tell you, it’s engaging, but paradoxically, not particularly distracting. I guess because I know the channel will cycle back to that location in about 15 minutes…around the clock.
Sometimes if I wake up during the night and can’t sleep, I’ll put it on for a while and I get to see the places in daylight that are dark when I watch during the day.
Me too!
My husband is a TV-all-the-time person, but at least it’s usually just the one TV. If he steps outside and I know he’ll be gone more than a couple of minutes, I turn it off.
He also “needs” TV noise to fall asleep, but he falls asleep really quickly and then I get up and turn it off.
I also avoid restaurants with TVs, just having one in the room sucks up all my attention, like it or not.
Wanted to add: there’s also a “Royal Albatross Cam” in Australia, which just shows an albatross sitting on a nest. Eventually, something may happen… 
No remote?
He’s generally lying on it or gripping it in his sweaty little hand. 
I am thinking there have got to be some innate neurological differences going on, above and beyond personal preference. I’m in the camp that can’t think with background noise of almost any sort: even in high school I could not study while music was playing at any volume. Human speech is an even worse distraction: I can’t not attend to any TV within earshot*, and since it’s nearly all idiocy**, it’s torment to have to listen to. Restaurants are also impossible if I can hear the individual conversations, idiotic or not. I know I’m weird, whatever.
*(this is the neurological part)
**(this is the personal preference part)
Of course I watch TV with intention, and enjoy it. That’s entirely different than being subjected to random TV while I’m trying to do something else, or simply work or sit in peace.
Never have understood the people who are comforted by background noise, and nervous in silence. But I assume this, too, is the neurological component.
You’re certainly not alone in that (Sorry, I’m sure you’d like to feel weird, but there are millions of us).
I’m even that way with music in a restaurant. My line is “There’s no such thing as ‘background music’.”
One time, when challenged on that by a lunch companion, I listed all the songs that had played since we’d gotten there.
I do appreciate the bars that have TVs on with no sound. I can sit with my back to them. And honestly, if I do want to watch some sportyball match, do I need to hear the non-stop drivel from the “color commentators”?
(No I don’t… :•)
Yes! If music is playing, I am listening to it, and no doubt pondering the lyrics.
I knew this was an old thread when someone said they were going to Kabul for work.
We definitely don’t keep the TV on, but my wife likes to turn on the news in the morning, and I can’t read with blathering on the set, so I go elsewhere with part of the paper. She wants to see the weather, but we live in the Bay Area so we don’t often have any weather.
We’ve never had a TV in the bedroom.
The worst is being in a room with a channel hopper.
You get sucked into a show and bam! It’s gone. They’ve jumped to another channel. I get too frustrated and have to leave the room.
Pick a damn channel and stick with it!
Does radio count? When I was in college mumble mumble years ago, the local student station would play classical music through the evening. I got so used to listening while studying that I now like to keep the radio tuned to a classical station while I work. (My coworkers HATED it, so I could only listen when they weren’t in the office.)
But television IS different. I’m not sure why, but I can’t stand it in the background.
My experience: There are two kinds of people in a hospital. Those who would just like silence and to rest, and those who need television always on as a distraction. The hospital staff always manages to match up these two kinds of people in one room.
Classical music is mostly instrumental (or if it has vocals, they’re usually in a foreign language), which means that it doesn’t distract the languagey part of my brain that I need to use if I’m reading something. In college I’d often play classical music to drown out background noise while studying.
…my mum always used to have the TV on. And as she got older, and her hearing got worse, the TV used to get louder. From six in the morning until midnight, a constant cacophony of “Judge Judy”, “Neighbours”, and Can’t Pay? We’ll Take It Away!
When she passed away not so long ago, the silence the next morning was bewildering. It took me a while to figure out that the noise had stopped, and when I figured it out, I cried again. It’s the quiet that is upsetting for me. I miss the noise.
When I’m working from home or otherwise at home by myself I always have the radio on and tuned to NPR. Without it it just feels too quiet. And it drowns out the sounds from outside, particularly the elementary school across the street.
But yeah, the TV is somehow different. For me a big part of it is that I consider having the TV on while no one is actively watching to be a waste of energy. I also can’t stand having a light on if no one is in the room. In the break room at work, there’s a big TV on the wall in the break room. Back when I was going in to the office there would sometimes be people in there watching it at lunch time, but then no one bothered to turn it off. So I’d go down there to get a drink at 3pm, I’d be the only one in there, and it would just be on, playing for an empty room before I got there. I always turned it off when I encountered that situation.
Sometimes I will turn it on as a noisemaker, but the volume needs to be low.
What does make me crazy is a loud radio when I’m doing critical driving, like backing into a tight parking space. Something about that is just psychologically pushy—maybe my auditory brain dominates my visual one? I don’t know but I can’t take it.
True story: when I was in college, I used to study at the cafeteria table. My friends were sitting all around chatting and there was a perfect sort of nondescript noise in the background that I loved. I can’t study in a library (too quiet), with a TV on (I’ll start watching it) or even music because I’ll play air guitar etc. But I loved that sort of murmur in the caf; I felt at ease with them thererather than subsconscious for sitting alone, if that makes sense. It reminds me of a power nap…I could study for 10 minutes and it would be worth an hour of other methods.