Every evening after dinner one of us will say, “8:30?”

And the other will brighten and respond, “Sure, 8:30.”

At the appointed time we plump pillows and attach our ancient, spinning-rainbows laptop to a computer monitor and settle in for the pleasantly numbing effect of three Seinfeld episodes in a row.

This is how we arrived, last night, at the 100th episode, a compilation of the funniest fragments of previous episodes.

Chris was surprised we’d watched so many so quickly.

That’s a week,” he said, mentally adding up the hours. “How depressing.”

Technically, he’s incorrect.

Bingeclock.com says it only takes 3 days, 18 hours and 30 minutes to watch every Seinfeld episode back-to-back, but I could see how adding up the hours might be important to a man who lives by the clock.

“Too much?” I said, teetering between worry over wasting precious hours and wanting to inhale the last 80 episodes as soon as possible.

“No,” he said, “but it’s good to read once in awhile.”

And yet even writer and critic Clive James, who is dying of cancer, spends his final precious hours watching TV box-sets including the West Wing and Game of Thrones—but not without admitting it leaves him feeling “appalled.”

“If you’re a grown man – indeed more than a grown man – if you’re a man who has grown old to the point of death and you’re sitting there watching a box set of Game of Thrones, you’re bound to ask yourself: ‘What is life?’ What is life for? Why am I waiting for Sean Bean to get executed? What is going on here?’”

Escapism is what's going on here and we all know it.

Obviously, three 20-minute Seinfeld episodes in a row does not a binge-watch make. (See me in a hotel room, alone, remote in hand.) At home, I binge more in the winter when days are short and cold or when I’m stressed or overwhelmed with work or life.

Before serial TV-bingeing was possible, I binged on books. As a kid, I read one Nancy Drew mystery after another in the branches of our apple tree, while eating thin mints from my Girl Scout cookie stash.

Thankfully, I no longer spend entire weekends with my nose in a book, like I did in my 20s, to forget my troubles at my then-new job.

Our Seinfeld habit, I have concluded, is not bingeing of the depressive, lonely kind. It’s an entertainment, akin to the “breakfast books” P.G. Wodehouse savored at the beginning of each highly productive day, for example, a Rex Stout or Ngaio Marsh mystery.

Seinfeld makes us laugh. A moderate binge that makes us laugh is likely to stave off a serious binge that makes us regret.

Like Wodehouse, we have found if we have a good book (or TV show) to read (or watch) after dinner, the rest of the day takes care of itself.

“8:30?”

“Sure, 8:30.”