-By Katherine







After I quit my financially-lucrative but less than soul-satisfying corporate job for a financially unrewarding but more personally-fulfilling lifestyle and career, I’ve been obsessed with sticking it to The Man. Whatever I do next, I don’t want to work for THE MAN, I would tell myself during those dark days after giving up the only career that gave me any hope of paying off the bill for the higher education that landed me the career in the first place.

Having devoured a dozen self-help books now, I’ve realized that job-wise, anyway, The Man was not some evil, supernatural, corporate goon, but merely my own inner demon and confusion about the meaning of success. I’m past that now. (Not the debt, just the inner turmoil.)

But still I picture a conniving corporate puppet master in the sky somewhere, conspiring to make us all spend too much money on 60” plasmas, disposable clothes at Old Navy and texting votes to American Idol, all the while laughing all the way to the bank he shares with those Wall Street yahoos at Goldman Sachs. I know The Man’s out there, which is why I’m going to stick it to him and cut my cable.

After some initial hardware outlays to make our ancient 32”, conventional analog tube TV receive free digital broadcast signals from the major broadcast stations plus PBS over the airwaves, and a few more techy toys to connect our computer to the TV so we can watch downloaded shows from Hulu.com, we’re going to save almost $100 a month.

But this really isn’t about the money. This mostly is tie to my own hands. Even relying on TiVo, which I use to record a few commercial-free PBSKids shows for my daughter and some quality programming on Discovery and the History Channel, (O.K., plus Damages), I already waste too much time on mindless crap and one too many reality shows. It’s really easy to turn off How I Met Your Mother when that’s the only thing on, but, if I’m really tired, it’s really hard to turn off a repeat episode of Project Runway, even when I’ve already seen it twice. My willpower is lacking, but the desire for less tube time is there. And I’m inspired by the guy at www.cancelcable.com.