When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much

The artist and prophet of modern vision, Andy Warhol, once confessed: “When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.” In these words lies a revelation of the shifting age—when the glow of the screen began to replace the warmth of human touch, and the presence of moving images grew to rival the presence of flesh and blood. Warhol, keen observer of his time, unveiled the truth that technology does not merely entertain, but reshapes the very fabric of relationships.

The ancients would have marveled at such a thing, for in their world companionship was survival. The hearth fire, the marketplace, the temple—these were the centers of life, where the bond of voice and hand sustained the soul. But Warhol speaks from a later dawn, when the television rose as a new hearth, gathering men and women not around one another, but around images cast by light. It was here that the balance began to shift, where solitude could be filled not by silence, but by spectacle.

In this confession lies both wonder and warning. The television set offered Warhol escape, company without complication, stories without demands, a world that could be observed without the risk of intimacy. It is the triumph of distance over closeness, of image over flesh. Yet even in this, there is no condemnation—only recognition that the world had changed, and with it, the human heart’s hunger for connection took on new forms.

Yet Warhol’s words carry a deeper irony. The man who celebrated relationships in art—between celebrity and admirer, between product and consumer, between fame and anonymity—admitted that in his personal life, the glow of the machine dulled the urgency of closeness. This reveals the paradox of the modern soul: never before so surrounded by images of people, yet often distanced from the people themselves.

Let the generations remember: the tools of each age shape the bonds of the heart. The television taught many to trade intimacy for spectacle, but it also showed the hunger for story and communion in new ways. Warhol’s words stand as both prophecy and lament—that while machines may distract us from close relationships, they also remind us of what is lost when light replaces touch, and when image replaces soul.