Firstly, commiserations and best wishes to Smartcat (and indeed any others of us who may be experiencing health issues at present - none of us are getting any younger after all).

A number of entwined thoughts and threads:
- Like Star, I find myself susceptible to device addiction and subsequent doom-scrolling if I'm not careful.   I use limited socmed as an info feed a) because I don't trust legacy 'news' media at all anymore, and b) I have my own curated list of semi-trusted sources and accumulators.  One method I have found useful to help counter the pull of the abyss is to have my e-reader app on all the devices I am likely to be fiddling with. Ignorong social media in favour of reading a book seems to be working for me reasonably well atthe moment.

- my reading mix seems to be including and adding more non-fiction than it used to, and the fiction side has a lot less escapism in it right now.

- I'm losing what would be reading and/or research time to time spent curating and expanding my physical media collections, particularly music.  This seems to be important to me right now for some reason.

- I'm still reading and enjoying The Rouse, and I may have stumbled upon A Working Theory of precisely why it may be more appealing to me individually amongst those of us discussing it hereabouts specifically.  If I can find the right words to articulate it coherently, it might be worth discussing here in a separate thread.  I'll need to think about it a bit more, but I do want to documeent it for my own amusement at least.  It holds up so far as I have been able to test it.  We'll see. But there is a dilemma - I don't want to slow down reading The Rouse to do that right now. And yes, I did grab an e-copy as welll as the physical book so I can actually keep reading it on any device when time permits.  

I'd better get back to it.