Don't get me wrong — we love this technology, so much so that TiVo, the company that pioneered it in 1999, has become a verb. No matter what kind of digital video recording system we have (and by the end of this year there will be an estimated 22.1 million users) we do not record shows, we TiVo them. Moreover, the phrase "watching television" has morphed into "watching TiVo," a semantic shift that might soon eliminate terms such as "boob tube" and "idiot box" from our pop cultural lexicon. And it was already bad enough that no one uses the word "algophilist" anymore.

I must not be as affluent as I thought. Caught in the shackles of my own personal TiVo tyranny, my DVR has reduced my viewing hours practically to zero. And it's not just because the remote control somehow ended up in my car. It's because turning on the TV is now less about escape than about being confronted with an electronic to-do list. There are the shows I want to watch, the shows I feel I should watch and shows the DVR thinks I should watch based on my prior selections. Faced with this monstrous inventory, the only logical thing to do is turn off the TV.

That's because with choice comes paralysis and, in turn, convenience usually finds apathy nipping at its heels. In the pre-TiVo era, television was challenging. We had to hunt for something worth watching and, if we found it, we sat still and paid attention. In the same strange way that it's infinitely more satisfying to hear a favorite song come up unexpectedly on the radio than to play it on a CD, there was a certain beauty to the old-fashioned TV experience. Even if we watched alone, we knew millions of others were watching the same exact thing, at the same exact moment. Even if there was nothing on that we particularly wanted to watch, there was something nice about settling on the best thing we could find and shutting off our brains for a while.

Of course, smart people aren't supposed to want to shut off their brains. DVRs, being for smarties (or at least the affluent, which may get you further than being smart) is supposedly about quality rather than quantity. It's supposed to reduce our guilt about what we watch. Instead, we get to feel guilty about what we don't watch.