Life & Wisdom Quote by Will McDonough

There is a gentle scolding embedded in McDonough's line, the kind that sounds polite until you realize it’s an indictment of a whole culture’s habits. By invoking “the inventors,” he borrows the moral authority of origin stories: the myth that technology begins as a public-spirited gift and only later gets bent into something tawdry. It’s a clever move because it shifts the debate away from taste (“bad TV”) to stewardship (“misused tool”). The target isn’t just programming; it’s the viewer’s posture - passive, anesthetized, treating the screen as furniture rather than a medium with choices baked into it.

The phrasing “the way we should” is doing double duty. On the surface, it’s a call for smarter viewing: education, civic engagement, shared cultural reference points that actually enrich public life. Underneath, it’s a critique of television as a one-way pipeline optimized for attention capture and advertising, a machine that rewards spectatorship over participation. McDonough suggests the problem isn’t that television failed, but that we accepted its default setting: consumption as a lifestyle.

Context matters: a mid-to-late 20th-century writer watching TV become the central hearth of the home, then the central marketplace of politics. The line lands as a pre-streaming warning about what happens when a powerful medium is treated like background noise: it doesn’t just waste time, it trains citizens.