Soft Temptations

Most of us — but not all — don’t have any trouble fending off the hard-core temptations like drugs, alcohol, sex and gambling. So we’re home free, right?

The television commercial for SoundTrack electronic stores opens with a couple of guys vegging on the couch, watching TV. A voiceover says that on average, Americans watch six hours of television every day.

Pause.

Then, boom! The screen comes alive with shots of brand-new television sets, including flat-panel plasma screens, rear-projection and surround-sound systems. The voiceover now says: “Let’s try to up that to seven hours a day!”

Watching television is no sin, but it might be an addiction — a soft addiction, according to Judith Wright, author of There Must Be More to Life: Finding More Life, Love and Meaning by Overcoming Your Soft Addictions. She compares two women in her study. The first uses television as a learning tool to explore the world and understand history and culture. She finds it rewarding to learn about the eating habits of the African Ashanti tribe of Ghana, or the mating habits of the Big-Headed Amazon River turtle in South America.

The second woman doesn’t use...