“Netflix is my life”

“If I’m having a bad day, I just put on Netflix and everything is automatically better,” senior Dustin Schuessler said.

People of almost every age deal with some type of stress on a daily basis. Whether it’s a second grader who is behind the reading curve, a high-schooler who is swamped with college applica- tions, a parent who is balancing three kids and two jobs or even a grandma who is dealing with retirement funds, everyone has something on their plate. So what are people doing now to deal with the stress?

It’s called binge watching. Netflix conducted a study in which 73 percent of its participants defined binge watching as people watching two to six episodes of the same TV show in one sitting. They found 61 percent of Netflix users guilty of binge watching.

“[Binge watching] is kind of like reading a book and you can’t put it down,” senior Lea Zdanski said.

According to the Newsweek article “Why You’re Addicted to TV,” people binge watch because they want to see how the problem in the last episode was resolved. They get too drawn into the next episode and can’t turn it off.

For some people, like senior Kellsie Weiss, the only solution is to terminate their account.

“I watched about seven hours a day and I just felt like I needed to stop and do something with my life,” Weiss said.

When interviewed, a majority of Northwood students said that Netflix and binge watching distracts them from everyday life and that they get “caught up” in shows very easily.

“TV viewers are no longer zoning out as a way to forget about their day, they are tuning in, on their own schedule, to a different world,” said cultural anthropol- ogist Grant McCracken in his report with Netflix. “Getting immersed in multiple episodes or even multiple seasons of a show over a few weeks is a new kind of escapism that is especially welcomed today.”

In simpler terms, from senior Brett Svendson: “[Netflix] is my life.”

– By Jessica Kolomichuk