I'm nervous about getting Lyme disease from ticks that are prevalent around my house, and I spend a fair amount of time checking my body for ticks. If someone else goes outside around my house, I prefer to avoid touching them until after a thorough tick check in case they have ticks crawling on them.

Typically I do "social" activities like checking email and Facebook once or twice a day, usually when eating meals at my computer. I almost never leave my house, not even to go outdoors, because I don't want to crush bugs by walking outside, and there may be ticks in the grass.

My main altruistic focus in life is seeking to reduce suffering, especially the suffering of non-human animals and possible digital creatures that may be created in the future. In philosophical jargon, I'm roughly a negative utilitarian, which means I think suffering is vastly more morally significant than happiness or other valuable things. Unbearable torture cannot be "morally offset" by also bringing enough pleasure into the world. This stance leads to a kind of antinatalism, because often the easiest way to prevent unbearable suffering is for a being never to be born in the first place. For example, there's an extraordinary amount of animal (especially invertebrate) suffering occurring in nature, due to predation, disease, starvation, and so on. One way to reduce this suffering is to reduce the amount of nature that exists. For instance, we could cover lawns with gravel to prevent grass growth, and with less grass to eat, there would be fewer animals. (In the long run, I would like to have a gravel, no-grass lawn at my house. It should also reduce the risk of ticks.)

I shave all the hair on my body fairly short, to roughly half a centimeter in length. Having less hair just feels less messy, and it makes checking my body for ticks easier.

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