Researchers out of Northwestern discovered there are four different personality types, and the majority of us fall into a single one: average.  (I guess it’s called “average” because the members are the average not because they’re average.)  But here’s the interesting thing: your personality type is based somewhat on age and experiences.  So you may be in one group right now but shift to a different group years down the road.

That’s interesting, right?

The news release reads: “…As people mature, their personality types often shift. For instance, older people tend to be less neurotic yet more conscientious and agreeable than those under 20 years old.”

The personality types are based on five traits: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.  You can read how they define these traits, and that’s how I approached this: I looked at the traits, determined whether I was high or low, and then looked at the description of the four types: average, reserved, role model, self-centered.

And I didn’t find myself in any of the types.

I’m high for neuroticism, openness, and conscientiousness.  I’m middle for extraversion.  I’m low for agreeableness.

I’m not average because I’m high in openness and not high in agreeableness.  I’m not reserved because I’m high in neuroticism and low in agreeableness.  I’m not a role model because I’m not low in neuroticism and high in agreeableness.  And I’m not self-centered because I’m not high in extraversion or low in openness or extraversion.

I’m still trying to figure out where I belong.  Where do you see yourself in these descriptions?

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

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So I should begin by saying that I spent a chunk of the summer reading an “end of the world” trilogy (The Last Policeman — so good!), which thoroughly freaked me out.  The world was ending.  People were awful, making the end of the world even worse.

And then the Guardian ran a piece about the super wealthy preparing for this inevitable event: “The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr Robot hack that takes everything down.”

It’s less about the tech itself and more about predicting how humans will behave.  It’s about people thinking how to continue to survive when the fragile social rules that govern are world are useless.  The article (and that book series) will terrify you, but it will also make you think long and hard about how we’re treating each other in the here and now.

How do you think people will behave after a world-ending event?  Will we bond together, or will all hell break loose?

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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 that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

This week I received an email from HarperCollins telling me that my three shipments of books were in the mail.  The problem was that (1) I had not ordered books, (2) they were being shipped to my old workplace’s defunct California address, and (3) no one at HarperCollins had any record of this shipment even though we could all track the progress of the boxes across the United States because the email contained a tracking number.

When I say this address is defunct, I mean that (1) they haven’t had an office there in ten years and (2) the company itself closed about two years ago.  And when I say that no one at HarperCollins had any record of this shipment, it’s because I spent Friday on the phone with customer service trying to figure out this mystery.  They had no record of any shipment to the company nor any record of my name or email address in the system, even though I had received a tracking email about my order.

It’s Sunday morning, and I still haven’t gotten a response on what is in the boxes.  So let’s all take a guess because there is no right answer.  After all, I will never see these books because it is going to a non-existent address in California.  The boxes will either sit outside, unclaimed, until the rain molds over their contents, or the boxes will be returned to HarperCollins.

So what’s in the boxes?

• Books that should have been sent over ten years ago that mysteriously shipped this week?
• A box of fantastic new bestsellers that someone decided I must read?
• A prank by a disgruntled HarperCollins employee?
• Ghost books?

I tried an Impossible Burger.  Our friends tried it years ago and told us about it.  It looks like beef and you cook it like beef, but it’s made from plants.  He told us that it was so realistic that he couldn’t tell the difference between real meat and the Impossible Burger.  That thought freaked me out so completely that I put the thought of it out of my mind.

But then a restaurant nearby started serving it, and I finally worked up my courage to try it.  At least, I felt courageous in the morning.  Then I silently obsessed about it for about an hour before we left the house for dinner.  Then I mentioned in the car that I was nervous.  Then I decided at the table that I didn’t think I could go through with it.  I ordered something else with the thought that I would try Josh’s burger.  If I liked it, we would split both of our meals, and if I hated it, I would eat my meal.

The twins took the first bites and reassured me that while it looked and smelled like beef, they could definitely tell the difference.  So I tried a bite and it was… fine.  I felt such internal pressure to eat it and enjoy it like everyone else.  So Josh and I split our meals.

I immediately started regretting it upon finishing, and I felt squeamish about the rest of my meal.  I get that it’s not meat, but it feels… too close.  Like I was eating something out of a Margaret Atwood novel.  It tasted fine, but the whole thing filled me with dread.

If you eat meat, you probably don’t recognize this dread.  But I’m assuming the vegetarians know exactly what I’m talking about.

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

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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:

• “You Are Not Your Grief” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Erin!
• “Can You See the Grief?” (An Unexpected Family Outing)

Okay, now my choices this week.

RisaKerslake writes about parenting after infertility.  “I believed them because back then, I had the illusion that if I could beat infertility, I could move on. That I was living sort of on pause and once I was holding my child, we could really start life as a family.”  This is such a great post about how the experience of infertility becomes part of your story; of course it has to inform your parenting, just like everything else you go through in life.  The post continues on another site, and the whole thing is a great read.

There were two posts that I read this week about unexpected pregnancies:

No Good Eggs writes about discovering she’s pregnant without assistance after three children through donor egg IVF.  Understandably, pregnancy wasn’t a possibility her brain was entertaining when she realized her uterus felt strange.  She writes, “How am I feeling emotionally. I feel everything. But really just scared. Scared this baby will have major issues and we will have to terminate. Scared this baby will have medium issues and we will be faced with a huge and confusing decision. Scared of giving birth again … And scared of raising a mix of donor and own egg kids, a combo I decided a long time ago I didn’t want.”  It’s a raw and wonderful post.

Much Ado About Nothing also has a surprise pregnancy post.  After a very stressful summer, she discovers that she’s pregnant.  She writes, “I didn’t want to tell anyone at first. After a few days of feeling turned upside down, my husband started to tell people. I only told my sister. I felt undeserving, I still do. I was still living in disbelief and utter panic.”  She is left in a limbo state after a scan, so I’m just holding her in my heart until she gets definitive news.

The roundup to the Roundup: I freaked out from the Impossible Burger.  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 September 14th and September 21st) 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 read a really interesting article about the pain of spending because Josh and I are trying to put a new budgeting/tracking system into place.  The general idea behind pain of spending is that “the less it hurts, the more people spend.”  In other words, the more inconvenient the purchase, the less likely you are to make it.

For instance, paying in cash is harder than paying with a credit card.  You need to get the cash and carry the cash and count it and hand it over.  That is more work than taking out a piece of plastic and swiping it.  The credit card company mails you the card; you have to go to the bank or an ATM to get the cash.  See, easy vs. hard.

Okay, cash isn’t really that difficult, but businesses are making it easier and easier to spend money.  It doesn’t even feel like real money when you’re talking about gift cards or swiping the phone.  So the article was about making it more difficult for yourself.  Putting a system in place that is enough of a pain-in-the-ass that you decide NOT to purchase something because it will mean doing X, Y, and Z.

I’m not a big spender — my dislike of change extends to not even getting new clothes and switching up my wardrobe — but I was sort of smitten with this idea of introducing pain-in-the-ass tasks in order to curb spending.

But there was a thought that I was still chewing on after reading the article.  George Loewenstein critiques the author’s recording system and points out that it isn’t effective:

It is ineffective, he says, because it focuses on the wrong type of transaction … There are usually more savings to be had from revisiting one’s auto- or home-insurance policy, or one’s phone bill, than from skipping the marginal cup of coffee. Loewenstein said it’s more effective to make changes with larger “one-time decisions,” instead of regularly having to make “all these micro-decisions.”

It’s not the random cups of coffee or the books or the totally adorable wooden duck I bought for myself in Scotland because IT WAS SO ADORABLE.  It’s the fact that we’re probably spending money on services that we’re not really using.  Or paying hidden fees that we don’t notice because we don’t look carefully at the 15 page bill.

Josh and I have started doing an audit of all existing bills, looking at things we can cut.  It will be interesting to see how much we save yearly when we’re done reading all the fine print.  So far, we’ve managed to cut $60.  Maybe not that impressive, but companies make it reeeeeeeally difficult to trim down bills.

How often do you audit your bills and see places to cut spending?  We’re thinking once every six months.