"Everyone binges now"

Look around. Everyone watched the lake thing in a weekend. Three a night is how television is watched now, and a book that treats it as a problem is treating the present as a problem.

Exelmans's survey found that four in five of her young adults described themselves as binge viewers. So yes, it's how television is watched, at least by that age group in that place. The same survey found that the ones who did it most had the worst sleep, and that ordinary viewing didn't go with poor sleep at all. Normal and costless aren't the same, and the survey that shows how normal it is shows the cost in the same table.

The word is worth a sentence. Binge was a word for drinking, and it got attached to television by people who wanted to describe watching a series in a sitting, and then it got adopted by the services themselves, cheerfully, as a thing to do. A word that was a warning became a feature. I've used it where the research uses it and I'll use it as little as I can elsewhere, because a person on a sofa at twenty to midnight isn't bingeing. They're watching the next one because it started.

Children are where the normal costs most, and it's worth saying while we're on the subject. Lauren Hale and Stanford Guan, in 2015, reviewed sixty-seven studies of screen time and sleep in school-aged children and teenagers. Ninety per cent found screen time linked with worse sleep, mainly shorter and later. They were careful to say that causation isn't proven and that the studies have limits. But a child in a house where the television plays the next one by itself is a child learning that this is how evenings end, and Hale and Guan's ninety per cent is what that tends to go with. Chapter 24 has more.

So everyone does it, and it costs everyone the same, and the fact that the cost is spread across a whole country doesn't make it smaller for you. It just means nobody remarks on it, the way nobody remarks on being tired on a Tuesday any more, because everyone is.