Every year, for one full month, we turn off every screen in our house.

No Netflix. No YouTube. No Disney+. No more binging the Kardashians.

My dad started “No TV Month” when I was a kid. I thought he was cruel. Now I do it with my own daughter, and I completely get it.

Here’s what happens: In the first days, I can watch her go through the symptoms of withdrawal. Her feeling of boredom fills the house like a stench that can’t be escaped. Slowly but surely, she begins to fill her days with other activities. She even read a 215-page book in a single day, couldn’t put it down.

Witnessing screen withdrawal is scary. But what fills the void is better.

Matt Stone — co-creator of South Park, one of the most successful TV shows in history (28 seasons and counting) — said: “I don’t watch any television. I got kids, I got work. I’m not a TV person. I never have been.”

The billionaire TV mogul who makes TV doesn’t watch TV. Let that sink in.

Steve Jobs didn’t let his kids use the iPad he invented. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home,” he told a stunned New York Times reporter. His biographer Walter Isaacson described dinners at the Jobs house: discussing books and history around the kitchen table. No one ever pulled out an iPad. The kids didn’t seem addicted to devices at all.

The guy who built the most addictive screen on earth kept his own kids away from it.

There’s a pattern here that most people miss:

The people who create the things we consume understand something fundamental: consumption is the default. Creation is the choice.

And the ratio matters, especially now that the news cycle seems desperate to hook every second of our finite attention and keep us in a perpetual state of terror.

I code, I write, I teach. And I shout random jabberings into a void on LinkedIn like a maniac in Central Park. And I can tell you from experience: the weeks I consume the most content are the weeks I create the least.

No TV Month isn’t about being anti-technology. It’s about remembering that screens are tools for making things, not just watching things.

When my daughter picks up a paint brush instead of a remote, she’s not “missing out.” She’s doing what the creators of the stuff she’d be watching are actually doing with their time.

Pick your month. Turn it off. See what happens.

You might be surprised what you build when you stop consuming.