I wonder how much time she has spent in her life watching TV, likely dating back more than 50, 60 or 70 years. Once upon a time, she possibly owned a black-and-white set, followed by one of the early model color televisions, and then another one and another and another over the decades.

She’s probably watched thousands of episodes of shows, everything from sitcoms and game shows to documentaries and dramas. Day after day, show after show, like most of us do.

The average American watches 3.5 hours of TV each day, according to the A.C. Nielsen Co. This adds up to more than 100 hours a month and 1,200 hours a year, not counting shows that get binged throughout a year.

If you live to 65, you’ll likely spend roughly 75,000 hours staring at different TVs in your home or at another person’s home or a bar or restaurant or hospital. In other words, you’ll spend between eight and 10 years of your life watching what was once called the “idiot box.”

Imagine that. Up to 10 years, possibly more for some people who keep their television on all day as they do chores, play with their children, or any other household task. Their TV remains on for more than 12 hours a day.

That astounding 10-year figure sounds idiotic, doesn’t it? Why would we spend so much of our fleeting time watching other people’s lives through a screen when we could be spending that time enjoying our lives doing anything else.

We could go for a walk, travel to a new city or neighborhood, visit our friends or relatives, exercise our bodies, or countless other things that the old lady in the assisted living facility can probably no longer do. At her age, and with her mobility problems, she is stuck. She’s stuck in her room, staring blankly at her TV hour after hour, week after week.

Just imagine all the things she could have done with that precious time in her younger years other than watching TV. She was healthy, active, mobile and free to roam the cabin of life. Not anymore. Every time I pass her room, it’s the same image, similar to many other older residents in that facility. And similar to too many of us who use television as daily company, or a needed escape, or a nightly sedative. Hour after hour, year after year.

Millions of Americans watch the same cable news networks day after day to get their political viewpoints validated and agitated. Other viewers are hooked on shows that mean absolutely nothing a few months or years later. It’s all from having a “popcorn brain,” consuming kernel after kernel of mindless entertainment. The bowl never empties as time slips through our buttery fingers.

Roughly half of American adults say they watch too much TV, according to TV-Free America, an organization founded in the 1990s by two friends — Henry Labalme and Matt Pawa — both who believed that too much television viewing was rotting the minds of Americans. They were right of course. We’re a nation of boob-tube junkies who are in denial about our collective addiction and, for many of us, the longest meaningful relationship of our lives.

Most of us look like the opening scene of every episode of “The Simpsons,” watching a box of dots mesmerize us as life swirls around with endless other options.

In the mid-1990s, TV-Free America championed the first TV Turnoff Week, prompting me to give it a try with my two young kids at the time. I didn’t want them to be a television addict like me, dating back to when I was their age watching some of the stupidest shows ever produced: “Gilligan’s Island,” “Three’s Company” and “The Brady Bunch” come to mind.

To my defense as a young teenage boy who was just getting interested in girls, I blame three fictional characters who flirted with me every week through my television screen: Mary Ann Summers, Chrissy Snow and Marcia Brady, respectively. Plot, schmot. I didn’t want the Professor to find a way off the island with my first girlfriend, Mary Ann.

Sorry, I’m getting off track here. (Damn you, Chrissy Snow.)

In the mid-1990s, when I tried TV Turnoff Week in our home, I didn’t get past Monday night. Pathetic, I know. And predictable. I blamed my kids.

Just like that old lady, I may spend my last years in an assistant living facility, watching TV all day long and wishing I could do anything else in the world. Truth is, if there was a TV show about this sad, cyclical subject, I’d likely binge it.