I WAS eyeing a chicken schnitzel sandwich at a café last week when a heated debate broke out.
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An impassioned young man at a nearby table was remonstrating with his fellow philosophers, imploring them to see his view.
The snoop in me wondered what they were arguing about.
The budget fallout? Women's rights? Closing the gap?
". . . and that's where you're wrong. There's no justification for it." James Hird? Palestine and Israel? ISIS?
"Sorry mate, you're crazy." Youth unemployment? Climate change?
"If they were to kill off Tyrion Lannister, there'd be no point in watching at all."
Game of Thrones.
Typical, I thought, of my generation to be more interested in a gore-filled fairytale than crucial state and national affairs.
If only, I huffed, we were as invested in the running of our country as we were the fate of House Stark.
What hope, I moaned, is there for society if our daily interactions are built around last night's TV?
But really, it would be a shame if they killed Tyrion.
I'd love to say that I come home from work each night and devour literature, current affairs, and social analysis. But I don't.
Instead, I cleanse my mind with Home and Away, followed by The Bachelor.
Some other confessions:
■ I refer to the days of the week by the shows I watch. (Offspring night, Utopia night, Homeland night etc)
■ I am familiar with plot and premise of 90 per cent of free-to-air soap operas, sit coms, dramas, comedies, drama-comedies, crime scene dramas, and animated comedies.
■ I am often emotionally attached to the fate and fortunes of a character on a TV show.
■ I feel like I personally know sporting commentators.
■ Plot and character news in my social media feed gazumps a lot of important life notifications. Including Mum's birthday.
■ I am predisposed to binge-watching DVD box sets, sometimes going through a whole season in a single viewing.
■ I'd estimate having digested 25 box sets over the past three years - at least 300 individual episodes.
■ I sneer at reality TV and offer a sarcastic commentary of any crappy, junk-food show I watch. But I'm still watching.
All this worries me for a couple of reasons.
One: the more TV I watch, the quicker I die - the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute estimating that, after the age of 25, every hour spent inactive on the couch reduces your life expectancy by 22 minutes.
The second, according to statistics, is that my time spent watching TV is probably going to increase. While TV has always been cheap and accessible entertainment, I was shocked to read the Australian Multi-Screen Report for January-March, which said people spent an average 93 hours and 16 minutes watching broadcast television each month - up 37 minutes on the same period last year, and equal to about three hours every day.
This included a monthly total of seven hours of digital playback, and an additional 12 hours spent watching internet TV and video on PCs, tablets and smartphones. Truly gone are the days of four channels and fighting over the remote.
Internet-based television has been flagged as the next great media battleground - with subscription services such as Netflix, Foxtel's Presto, and StreamCo set to fight already-established digital channels such as ABC iView and SBS on Demand for control of our eyeballs.
And while there's no doubt some riveting, culturally rich TV out there, I wonder what will come from unprecedented access? Is it a good thing that we can watch whatever we want, whenever we want, wherever we want, and on whatever device we have handy?
Or should we instead try to add a TV-free day or two to our schedules?