I just read a book that I loved so much that my heart hurt when I finished the last page.  It reminded me of Elan Mastai’s All Our Wrong Todays in the sense that you will feel such an ache as you move through the weirdness.  It’s called Tell the Machine Goodnight by Katie Williams.

The heart of the book is a hand-held machine called Apricity that can tell you with a simple cheek swab what will make you happy.  Not combat depression but move you from ennui to joy.  Throughout the book, people either use or reject the device, choosing to know or remain in the dark about what will make them happy.

Because it’s a tricky thing.  You don’t have to follow the machine’s advice, but how could you not?  How could you discover that doing something as simple as eating tangerines will make you happy and then choose not to eat tangerines?  And yet the suggestions range from benign (eat tangerines) to extreme (remove a healthy fingertip or cut yourself off entirely from your identical twin).  And it comes with the knowledge that the act itself — no matter how painful it sounds in the moment — will bring you happiness if you trust the machine.

Because you’re told that the machine is 99.97% accurate.  And what are the chances that you’ll fall in the .03%?

I think I would want to know.  Maybe I would act on all the advice.  Maybe I wouldn’t.  But I think I would want to know… now.  Meaning, I don’t know if I would have sat for the machine at every point in my life.  When I was in the throes of infertility, would I have sat for the machine?  Would I want to know that kind of secret when I was feeling so fragile?  Am I only willing to take the risk right now because the step is lower to get to happiness?

Would you sit for a machine if it could tell you the three things that would make you happy, even if one of those things could be something you wouldn’t want to hear?

Carolyn Hax gave great advice this week to a person asking what to do for a friend after her baby was born still.  The person didn’t know if she should reach out because she hadn’t been formally told about the death.  Hax told her to stop waiting for an invitation to comfort her friend.

I guess what struck me is that — as humans — we seem to wait for an invitation to do good things, such as offer comfort after a loss, but we don’t wait for an invitation to do things like offer unsolicited advice.  Seriously.  How many times has someone inserted their opinion into your life?  But we’re reluctant to jump forward and send a condolence card to acknowledge a loss?  I rarely creep into the comments, but I appreciated this one by Cinnamon Owl: “If you’d heard her husband had died but they hadn’t made a public announcement yet, would you never refer to the death?”

*******

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 in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

*******

And now the blogs…

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

• “So Why Aren’t There More of Us (Part 2)?” (The Road Less Travelled)

Okay, now my choices this week.

No Kidding in NZ is still processing the shooting in the mosque in New Zealand a few weeks ago, and she passes along her Prime Minister’s wise words, which are applicable in so many moments in life.  She explains, “Too often our society doesn’t allow us to grieve – especially when our losses are invisible – and so we have to remind each other that it is okay to grieve, and to ask for help.”  It is a gorgeous post, giving comfort.

The Uterus Monologues has a guest post about staying sane when you’re in crisis mode over a long period of time.  Her poster explains self-compassion: “If you have a friend who was struggling, your response to that person would most probably be along the lines of ‘I am sorry to hear that, it’s OK, I am here if you need me’. Self-compassion is about being able to say that to yourself.”  Such an important skill to practice daily.

Lastly, My Path to Mommyhood has a post about needing to explain that living child-free isn’t a temporary decision.  I love this post for this wonderful summary of a happy life: “Why is it that EVERYONE ELSE has far more difficulty with my childlessness than I do with my childfree status? I mean, it’s sad that we wanted it and it didn’t happen. It’s sad that we fought for so long and at such a great cost that we had to end our own journey. But it can’t STAY sad. My life is NOT sad.”  It made me want to stand up and cheer.

The roundup to the Roundup: Don’t wait to give comfort.  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 March 22nd and 29th) 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.

Our library system uses an app called Libby for e-book borrowing.  You can search for a title on the app or browse a category OR browse the last items returned to Libby.  In other words, it’s like GoodReads except you’re seeing what’s available now that other people are done with it.

Popular stuff ends up on that list — new releases — but interesting older books end up on there, too, and enter into a strange loop: person one checks out, reads, and returns an old Nick Hornby book.  The person two sees this book on the list and says, “High Fidelity!  I haven’t thought about that book in years.”  And then they check it out and the loop keeps going with each new person perusing the recently returned list, seeing this old book, and checking it out themselves because they figure someone else found it worthy to spend their time reading.

Unlike the genre lists, I usually know every single book on the recently returned list because, again, they tend to be popular books.  And if they’re not popular to begin with, they become popular because they keep looping around again.

It would be cool if our physical library had a bookshelf like that.  They have a new release section where you can see what’s hot at the moment because it’s new.  But it would also be cool if they put returned books on a special set of shelves for a few days before moving them back to their proper place.

I love peeking at what other people are reading.

Do you ever choose books to read just because you see other people around you reading it?

There’s a post that has been making its way around the Internet for the last week or two.  The author speaks about a lesson she learned at her brother’s funeral.  A community showed up to say goodbye to him.  While the author has friends and family, she realized she didn’t have a community.  At least, not a group of people she could count on in the way that her brother — who invested many of his hours into his community — could when he was at the end of his life.

She describes all the things these people did for the family, and then writes,

This was community. And what I would come to learn, slowly, is that community is about a series of small choices and everyday actions: how to spend a Saturday, what to do when a neighbor falls ill, how to make time when there is none. Knowing others and being known; investing in somewhere instead of trying to be everywhere.

I paused after reading that passage.  Do I have a community or do I have a mishmash of family and friends?
And what is the difference, and how important is that difference?  I checked in with my heart: was I lonely?  There are times when I don’t make time for other people; when I give everything to Josh and the twins and then crawl into bed and move the phone calls I have to make over one day on the to-do list.

I need to stop doing that.

Because, like the author, “My community will be here for my family if I cannot be. And if I die, my kids will be surrounded people who know and love them, quirks and warts and oddities and all.”

It’s a really gorgeous piece.  I would love to hear your thoughts on it.

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

*******

I’m reading Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets (which is fascinating), and she talks about how our brains are hardwired to compare ourselves to the people around us, and then create a mental narrative of where we stand based on those comparisons.  She writes on page 107: “Our brain is built to seek positive self-image updates.  It is also built to view ourselves in competition with our peers.”

It reminded me an article that I read a few months ago about why the ultrarich still strive for more money even though their rational brain knows that they don’t need to hoard more cash for a rainy day.  The article asks: “But at a certain level of wealth, the next million isn’t going to suddenly revolutionize their lifestyle. What drives people, once they’ve reached that point, to keep pursuing more?”

And then: “Norton says that research regularly points to two central questions that people ask themselves when determining whether they’re satisfied with something in their life: Am I doing better than I was before? and Am I doing better than other people?”  Like Duke’s book, this is also an interesting piece, especially why we latch onto money instead of other measures of success for answering those questions.

It feels overwhelming to stare into a bottomless goal.  An ever-moving enough line.

Your thoughts?

*******

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 that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.