My Bedroom TV Is Bigger Than My First House

...and somehow, you still think you could have gone a bit bigger.

I was sitting in bed the other night, watching television, when I had a rather disturbing thought. My bedroom television is seventy-five inches.

Seventy-five.

And the really worrying part? I don't even think of it as big anymore. In fact, when we bought it, my first thought was, "It'll be fine for the bedroom." The bedroom. The lounge still has the bigger television.

There are only a couple of inches between the edges of the television and the wall. Any bigger and we'd have to knock through into the neighbour's lounge room.

Somewhere along the way, we've completely lost our sense of perspective.

I remember when televisions were pieces of furniture. They had polished wooden cabinets. You didn't hang them on the wall. You built the room around them. If they stopped working, your dad would walk over and give them a decent thump on the side. Nine times out of ten, that fixed the problem.

If you wanted to change channels, you didn't reach for a remote. You reached for the youngest child. "I'm not getting up!" "You've got younger legs." That was our remote control.

There were four channels if you were lucky.

Nothing was on after midnight except static. And somehow... we survived.

Now we complain because Netflix takes three seconds to load. We've become impossible to satisfy. The other day I realised we'd bought a new television. Not because the old one had broken. Not because the picture was bad. Not because it was too small.

Simply because there was a sale. The old television didn't go to landfill, of course. No Australian household throws anything out. It simply gets promoted. Or demoted depending on how you look at things.

The new television went into the bedroom.

The old bedroom television moved elsewhere.

Everything gets a second career. Televisions. Speakers. Coffee machines. Even towels. Nothing retires in Australia. It just gets reassigned.

Sometimes I wonder what my younger self would think if he walked into my house today.

A seventy-five-inch bedroom television. Cappacino at the touch of a button. Music following me from room to room. A robot vacuum cleaning the floor.

He'd probably think I'd become a millionaire. The truth is, I'm just an ordinary woman... ...living in a world where ordinary has quietly become extraordinary.

And that's the strange thing about progress. It doesn't happen all at once. One day you wake up and realise your bedroom television is bigger than the first flat you ever rented...

...and somehow, the Squeeze still thinks we could have gone a bit bigger.