I read an amazing book recently, The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe, that I’ll highlight in my best books post next month. Like many Jonathan Coe books, it explores the conservative movement in the UK and the US (within a murder mystery frame), and how people are drawn to or repulsed by certain political ideologies.

But the best part of the book comes on page 168. The character is retelling a lecture he went to while at college where the lecturer makes a point about how famous pairings often stand in for society as a whole:

Here, in the comic interplay between a Laurel and a Hardy, or an Abbott and Costello, you had a microcosm of how all people interacted with one another: frustration, misunderstanding, getting in each other’s way, but also total interdependence and – in the case of the greatest double acts – real and unwavering love. Look at Vladimir and Estragon, he said – look at Laurel and Hardy; even look at Morecambe and Wise – and you see a pared-down image of a more-or-less functioning society. Human beings doing their best to get along together; unable to hide their impatience, sometimes, with the recalcitrant behaviour of their fellow earth-dwellers, but each one unable to do without the other.

The character — and by extension, Coe — continues to talk about how community has changed from that time after the Second World War to the rise of the first mobile phone:

I think people used to believe in a different kind of society. We had a model for it, back then: more or less organized, more or less functioning, held together by the belief that things should not be shared out too unequally. It was imperfect, of course, full of injustices and disagreements and bumps in the road, but above all it was cohesive: just like one of the great double acts.

Even if we didn’t always achieve it, we had a goal of moving together as a society vs. focusing on the individual and uniqueness, our personal needs, and our personal success. He traces the change back to the 1980s.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since reading the book; it’s hard not to as you watch the dismantling of pieces of society that were in place to keep us moving forward together with equity and what happens when society becomes so fractured that we can’t find each other again?

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Can you tell that we’re in high-distraction mode? The third game I started playing feels very close to a random guess-the-word game I used to play and stopped because it felt too hard. So I’m not sure how long I’ll stick with Betweenle, but I like that I’ve been getting the word in a few guesses.

It helps that it has to be a five-letter word vs. any random word of any length in the dictionary.

Leaving this here in case you also need a distraction.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

While Josh and I play most of our word and geography games in the morning (the list has grown so freakin’ long — from Wordle to Worldle and everything in between), we save the Minute Cryptic for after dinner and work on it together. We’re trying to get good enough at cryptic clues to do a full puzzle at some point.

Sometimes, we solve it, but we have no idea how we arrived at the answer.

Sometimes, we need to ask for multiple letters.

But every once in a while, we play the cryptic exactly as it is meant, figuring out the wordplay and getting the answer on the first try.

I like the Minute Cryptic because they have a short video explaining the answer afterward, so it’s truly a learning tool meant to get you ready to solve a whole puzzle.

When I grow up, I want to be my kids. They have much firmer boundaries with protecting their emotional health and sticking to them than I do. A case in point: when content on a social media site made them feel distressed as they scrolled, they signed out of the account. They need to log in via a computer to see their account, making it unlikely they’ll go on more than every few days. Enough to check up on people, not enough to get them upset.

They are the Michael Pollan of consuming creative content and information (consume content, not too much, mostly heart-filling things).

I noticed the same reaction, and all I did was check more. I would see something upsetting on the app that caused me to set down my phone and worry. But then I thought, “I must recheck the app to see if there are more upsetting things.” And because I mostly went on social media in the evening after work, I was also carrying those last things I saw into bed, worrying about everything in the dark.

I wish I could tell you that I took the twins’ lead and logged out of the app. I didn’t. Social media is how I stay in touch with many people. But I did start to ask myself if I needed to recheck the app, reminding myself that I had just checked it a few minutes ago and meditating on how the news makes me feel. My goal is to take my scrolling down to twice a day — two quick check-ins.

Let’s see if I stick to the plan.

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Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.

Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

And now the blogs…

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But first, second, helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. To read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Hopelessly Infertile and Surrounded by Fertiles comes to a profound thought while reading a romance book that applies to the political landscape happening right now. She explains: “So many people spend so much time denying women’s feelings and experiences. I want a space where women’s experiences and feelings and choices are respected.” As she points out, it’s not that we can’t make mistakes or change our mind; but sometimes you sense the character is leading the way, and sometimes you sense the author is making all of the choices.

The Barreness breaks down the current landscape, bringing in the personal including what she is doing to get her voice heard. This perfectly summarizes how so many of us feel right now: “I have found myself on more than one occasion staring off into space. Trying to figure out where the ground is, as everything seems to be floating in zero gravity.” That ending to the post — wow.

The roundup to the Roundup: Cutting back on social media. Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between Feb 14 – Feb 21) and not the blog’s main URL. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week. Read the original open thread post here.

I went through a bit of a reading crisis recently where I got beyond the midway point in two books and stopped enjoying them. They weren’t actively upsetting me; picking them up felt like a slog.

I know the whole sunk cost fallacy of continuing to invest time into something you’re not enjoying, but one of the drawbacks of tracking your reading in a tool like Goodreads is that you want credit for that initial time investment. You want those pages read to count in your page total at the end of the year.

A bad reason to keep reading a book.

I read a statistic recently that gave me pause, and I’ve been using it as a barometer for whether to keep going:

You’re likely to only read 2,500, maybe 5,000 books in your lifetime. Is this book you’re slogging through really worth the time that could be spent reading another, better book?

Only 2,500 books? Would I get to the end of my life and be happy that I used one of those slots on the book I’m reading?

In one case, I kept reading the story. I didn’t enjoy it, but it wasn’t terrible. I was glad I finished it because it gave me insight into whether I’d like other books in that genre. (Probably not.)

The other book was in a familiar genre, and while a lot of other people would like it, I found that the author kept saying the same thing. I looked up and realized I was 120 pages into the book and hadn’t learned anything new about the characters or the plot. So I stopped reading that one and switched to something I was certain I’d be happy to have spent one of my 2,500 on.

It brings a certain weight to your choice if you think of it as a set budget of time. A limited number of slots. It doesn’t mean everything has to be profound or amazing, but I need to stop holding onto books I know I’ll enjoy for some future point and consume them now so I’m not using up those slots on things I don’t love and never getting to the ones I know I will.