Today, I’m pausing this practice. This decision supports my commitment to the activities that matter most to me:

• Reducing the suffering of farmed animals - a significant intellectual and emotional commitment
• Living as my true self - a significant mental, physical, and finanical commitment
• Being the most supportive wife and dog-mum that I can be - a significant time commitment!

As such, I’ve removed most of my 230 blog posts. I’ve retained the 18 posts that are most important to me. These posts illustrate the spread of concepts that reflect my identity: animal advocacy; living compassionately; navigating mental illness; social and political analysis; and one post on the mathematics of football!

I may very well return to blogging one day. But for now, I want to be ruthless in focusing on my three core goals listed above.

Peace and love <3

• The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time by Alex Korb, PhD
• The Cognitive Behavioral Workbook for Depression: A Step-by-step Program by William J. Knaus, EdD
• The Cognitive Behavioral Workbook for Anxiety: A Step-by-Step Program by William J. Knaus, EdD

Korb’s The Upward Spiral identifies a collection of tools, each of which can, gradually and over time, help to improve one’s mental state and soften the grasp of depression. As Korb explains:

After many years of research, I’ve come to understand that there is no one big solution to depression, but there are many small ones. Simply by making small changes in your thoughts, actions, interactions, and environment, you can change the activity and chemistry of key brain circuits that contribute to depression. Sometimes a small change can have big effects, though the process will not always be straightforward.

Knaus’s Workbook for Depression identifies a similar list of twelve steps. As Knaus explains:

When you are depressed, it can be hard to think of positive steps to take. You may feel that you lack energy. Pessimism may cloud your judgment. This section discusses the best natural and psychological steps that I know of to use. I developed them for myself when I was once depressed. […] I would recommend them to my family and friends. They can help you.

I’ve integrated the lists from Korb and Knaus, and over time I’ve added or changed items on this list based on my own experience, advice from other people living with depression, and recommendations that I’ve received from clinicians/therapists/peer mentors/psychiatrists that have turned out to be helpful for me.

I keep this list on my phone, ready to access. It’s not a to-do list; rather, it’s a menu of options. When I find myself beginning a depressive downward spiral, I pick the option on the list that feels easiest. Maybe I don’t feel quite up to exercising - but maybe sitting in the back garden and watching the clouds feels more accessible, or perhaps texting a friend to meet me for coffee is more what I need. Then, once I’ve used that option, there will usually be a subtle but real upward step in my mood — meaning I can choose the next option.

Some of these options might feel a bit silly at first (eat a new type of food? really?). One clinician echoed this feeling by saying that these actions can feel a bit like being told “to suck eggs” — as I’ve written about previously, I’m no stranger to the all-encompassing, world-shaking agony of an intense depressive episode. But the options do work, whether you examine the peer-reviewed evidence or simply ask people who have learned to navigate depression themselves.

Over time, and as I build these habits into my life, I find myself following the upward spiral more frequently than the downward spiral.

Currently, my list contains these items:

• Sleep
• Exercise - move your body, a little or a lot
• Nutrition - eat the right amount of nourishing foods
• Community - nourishing your relationships with loved ones, regularly immersing yourself in social connection, and asking trusted people for help and support
• Hobbies - immersive, engaging activities that can help you enter monotropic focus (also see Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism for a deeper exploration of meaningful hobbies)
• Executive function - make a plan or a decision, and it almost doesn’t matter what exactly
• Outdoors - seeing the sky, walking around the block, going to the park
• Novelty - trying new things, even if they seem silly (e.g., pick a new vegetable to use in a meal, or visit a new cafe)
• Biofeedback - massages, smiling, relaxation techniques
• Gratitude - gratitude journalling, which annoys me with how effective it is
• Take leave from work
• Cozy fantasy - escapist, low-stakes fiction, often sci-fi or fantasy
• Therapy
• Persistence - remain confident in the plan
• Resolve conflicts - avoid lingering issues
• Stick to priorities - cut back on non-essential tasks, and use your limited capacity for the activities that really matter (e.g., getting through the work day, feeding yourself, having a shower)
• Avoid news and social media - living in 2026 is really challenging, and it’s easy to underestimate the emotional burden of simply living in the current geopolitical landscape
• Seek good news stories - subscribe to the weekly fixthenews.com
• Contest depressive self-talk - CBT techniques and similar
• Schedule activities - set a time and date on which you vow to do something that you know makes you feel good (e.g., socializing, playing sport, going for a walk outside)

Early in the novel, while a single character narrates the plot, the character refers to themselves in the first-person plural — when Nell is narrating, she says not “I” and “me” but “We the F&N unit”. The point is to convey the psychological (and subtly unhealthy) co-dependence of Fay and Nell at this stage in their lives:

The point, though, is that there must, mathematically speaking, be twenty gay Idlewilders among us. We the F&N unit count ourselves as one single gay unit, which leaves us with nineteen probable homosexuals in the Upper School…

Since I read this novel a couple of years ago, I’ve found myself returning to many aspects of the story. Strangely, the turn of phrase “we the F&N unit” captures something specific that I’ve been contemplating at work.

In the effective altruism community, it is common for people to think in the following terms: “I want to use my career/money/resources to do the most good in the world.” This is a deeply worthy calling.

But I think one aspect of how the EA community conceptualizes this aspiration is misguided. The phrase is often translated into concepts like “At what organization can I have the greatest impact?”, or “How many lives will I save if I take career path A rather than career path B?”.

Recently, as I’ve been reflecting on which animal advocacy projects on which I want to focus my efforts, my managers have said things like “I’m not sure if you’ll have the biggest impact at our organization, since you could plausibly have a greater impact at this other organization.” That is, my managers start talking about my counterfactuals — the impact that I can have if I take some path rather than some other path. This quickly degenerates into a game of four-dimensional chess. (Some attempts to model individual impact have even invoked the economic concept of Shapley values.)

I don’t think that the question is that deep. To be sure, it is very challenging to have impact in the world, and discerning impactful vs non-impactful projects is a serious empirical and philosophical challenge.

No one person has impact in a vacuum — I think we’d all agree on that. To help a chicken in Nigeria, you need the following ingredients:

• A lobbyist to ask policymakers to improve chicken welfare policy
• An organization of people to support that lobbyist, e.g., via operations, communications, bookkeeping, and other tasks important for keeping any project running smoothly
• A grantmaker to fund the organization
• A tech billionaire to endow the grantmaker with money to give away in the first place
• A philosopher to publish a book that convinces the lobbyist to enter animal advocacy in the first place
• A functional Nigerian government regulation and enforcement system
• and so on.

Is that lobbyist having impact? Maybe.

But I think that, even if this project does help the chicken, the more realistic assessment is that the impact is an emergent characteristic of the community as a whole.

To me, the question is not the fine-grained “which individual choice will enable me to save the most lives?” but the coarse-grained “which projects seem like promising avenues to saving lives in an impactful and cost-effective, and where exactly can I slot in as a valuable component of those projects?”

As I wrote in a previous article, I have been “shifting from a mindset of individual action (taking the individual actions that do the most good) to the organization and movement level (supporting larger units to take collective actions that do the most good). I’ve been contemplating this for a few years, and recently discussed this idea with someone from [The Humane League]: it’s reasonable to measure impact at the level of an org, but probably not any finer-detail than that (e.g., impact of each individual employee).”

In short, there are many inspiring projects happening in the world — there are many organizations helping projects to deliver impact in people’s lives in a cost-effective way. These organizations exist at many points in the ecosystem — from funding, to movement building, to operations, to research, to direct work. To do any good in the world, we need all of these elements — and when all the elements are in place and working smoothly, impact for people and animals emerges from this complex system (and when some elements are poorly designed, there is no impact — which is why it’s important to keep organizations and people in the advocacy space accountable for their decisions and operations).

Under this view, we can point to examples of impact arising from the community — and doing genuine good in the lives of people and animals — but individual impact does not exist as a quantity that can be measured. There really is no “Fay” and no “Nell”, but only “We the F&N unit”.

Further reading:

• Individual humans are profoundly limited — and community can set us free
• Doing the most good in a world with superb-quality AI

Like all fish, Atlantic salmon are beautiful to watch and elegantly adapted to their environment. In the case of Atlantic salmon, one gets the impression of a marine tiger or wolf, which in ecological terms (salmon being predatory fish) is not an inappropriate analogy.

Salmon are farmed for their meat in a process that involves hatching eggs, a juvenile stage in freshwater, and an adult stage in circular cages in the ocean. The bulk of the world’s farmed Atlantic salmon production come from six countries: Norway, Chile, the UK, the Faroe Islands, Canada, and Australia (Fishcount).

Chile collects a range of data on salmon production, including mortality figures in sea cages and official farm inspection records. I recently submitted a freedom-of-information request with the Chilean government to obtain some of this data.

Most notably, the data records the number of Atlantic salmon who died on Chilean farms, with each row of data matched to a particular farm and a particular week of the year. My data covers the years 2022 to 2024.

Between 2023 and 2025, there were 8,970,205 individual Atlantic salmon who died on sea farms in Chile. This pales in comparison to the ~450 million individual salmon who survived until harvest and slaughter during this period Fishcount. Moreover, this data excludes fish who died during the hatching and freshwater stages of production.

But I think it’s important to recognise that these are individuals who are brought into existence and then eventually killed by humanity’s modern, industrial economic systems of food production.

All of those 8,970,205 individuals — while they spent their lives confined to a freshwater aquaculture tank, and then to a round cage suspended in the ocean — had feelings and preferences and personalities and a lived experience, a history. Then, through disease or starvation or exposure to the elements, they were killed, so that humans can eventually harvest and eat their siblings. Because they died before harvest and slaughter, their existences aren’t even recorded in published statistics of meat production. I’m sad that I can never meet them — I wish I could have.

Further reading about salmon productions and the implications for animal lives:

• Salmon welfare @ Welfare Footprint Institute
• Mapping the industry and supply chain for farmed fish in Europe
• The economics of fish farming and fish welfare in Europe: A systematic review

At first glance, her task appeared nearly impossible: during the Obama administration, the House Republicans had passed more than sixty bills repealing all or part of Obamacare. […] Pelosi didn’t waste a minute. Within a few weeks of the election, she convened a conference call with a coalition of health care advocates to begin planning grassroots actions in support of the law. Don’t agonize, organize. They planned mass health care demonstrations across the country the weekend before Trump’s inauguration. Pelosi attended the inauguration wearing a blue “Protect Our Care” button.

The phrase “don’t agonise, organise” is mentioned a few times in the book as one of Pelosi’s catchy personal slogans. (Another is the five P’s: “proper preparation prevents poor performance”.)

Since I read that biography in 2023, I’ve been coming back to that phrase. There’s something really powerful in it — in the depths of a discouraging or overwhelming situation, rather than succumbing to despair, I am choosing to exercise my power of executive function.

The role of executive function has also been mentioned in another favourite book of mine: Alex Korb’s 2015 book The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time.

Korb identifies a collection of tools, each of which can, gradually and over time, help to improve one’s mental state and soften the grasp of depression. Korb talks about executive function in a section called “Set Goals, Make Decisions”:

Making decisions includes creating intentions and setting goals—all three are part of the same neural circuitry and engage the prefrontal cortex in a positive way, reducing worry and anxiety. Making decisions also helps overcome striatum activity, which usually pulls you toward negative impulses and routines. Finally, making decisions changes your perception of the world—finding solutions to your problems and calming your limbic system.

In short, plan something. Make a decision about something. Exercise your executive function. The thing you’re planning, or making a decision about, is almost beside the point — the purpose is simply to find a way to exercise your executive function.

Korb cites an abundance of neuroscientific research in support of this tool, as well as the other tools that Korb discusses, like exercise, socialising, therapy, and the like. But I’ve also found from my personal experience that Korb’s recommendation has indeed helped me crawl out of that dark hole of depression.

Exercising executive function is also, often, a more achievable facet of Korb’s upward spiral. When I’m depressed, it can be really, really hard to haul my ass into my garage for a workout or to invite a friend for coffee. I often exercise my executive function as the first entry into that upward spiral — after which those more involved facets, like exercise and socialising, feel within reach.

I suspect this might be why, at my job, I find operations and administration such enjoyable tasks — organising things simply makes the brain feel good.

I also find echoes of this concept in Lewis Richmond’s book Aging as a Spiritual Practice: A Contemplative Guide to Growing Older and Wiser. Richmond explores “the way we lose old pieces of our identity as we age, and the opportunity to create new identities to replace what we have lost” and describes how the people who age well tend to be the people who adapt with flexibility, seeking out new activities and connections and cultivating a curiosity and enthusiasm for what is happening around them as they age.

As I’ve alluded to above, executive function has repeatedly proven itself as a powerful tool in my own toolbox while navigating mental illness. During November 2025, I experienced my darkest period yet — I was briefly hospitalized for my own safety, and I was facing a significant upheaval of my personal life. This was truly a week from hell, the very depths of despair.

I can recall the precise time when this despair gave way to a sober and modest form of hope — I didn’t feel better by any means, and my personal life and material situation was still facing upheaval, but I began to see a path foward.

One of the things that got me there (apart from the love and support of pretty much every friend and close family member in my life) was, strangely, planning what my life was going to look like after this period. I was suffering deeply, but I could ask my sister to help me shop for a used car (which I was going to need), and I could make a plan to attend the upcoming pre-season kickaround with my new football team, and I could ask to join my dear friends to play some card game — in short, taking agency and exercising my executive function.

Update 2026-06-15

This view is explored, in the context of motivation and decision-making, by Charles Duhigg’s book Smarter Better Faster: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life in Business:

From these insights, a theory of motivation has emerged: The first step in creating drive is giving people opportunities to make choices that provide them with a sense of autonomy and self-determination. […] This is a useful lesson for anyone hoping to motivate themselves or others, because it suggests an easy method for triggering the will to act: Find a choice, almost any choice, that allows you to exert control.

Dr. Heuschrecke: Please have a chair, Mr. Sneak. No, not the couch, please. I am not a psychiatrist.
Sneak: Well, that makes a nice change, at any rate. What are you, then?
H: […] I am a physician of philosophy. I try to cure the philosophical maladies of my patients. You have been sent to me because my psychiatric colleagues have been able to find nothing whatever wrong with you psychologically.
S: But if that is so, why am I in such a depressed state? I thought my condition had been diagnosed by your colleagues as melancholia.
H: That was an early provisional diagnosis, to be sure, but it has proved to be incorrect. You are not a melancholic. You are simply melancholy.
S: Do you mean to say there is nothing seriously wrong with me?
H: I mean to say there is nothing clinically wrong with you at all.
S: Then there is something wrong with me?
H: There is.
S: Tell me what it is, Dr. Heuschrecke, for God’s sake!
H: You are suffering from a logical fallacy. […] They wisely, and I must say surprisingly, concluded that your problem was not psychological but logical, and so they sent you along to me.

— Bernard Suits 1978, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia

Lately, I’ve been struggling with depression and existential dread.

To be specific, I have been grappling with deep, paralyzing fear. I’m scared that my two beautiful rescue dogs will get sick and die. I’m scared that my loving relationship with my beautiful wife will end. I’m scared that my work advocating for farmed animals will be ultimately unsuccessful, and those animals will continue to suffer.

Recently, it occurred to me: I’m anxious and depressed because I care so much. I have so much love for my dogs, my wife, the billions of farmed animals around the world. My despair is a reflection of my care.

In fact, my dogs will definitely die. My relationship with my wife will definitely end, one way or another. My animal advocacy might bear some fruit, but it will definitely fail to end all animal suffering.

The reason is that we are finite creatures living in an incomprehensibly vast and complex universe. To be sure, the combination of technological capabilities, scientific knowledge of the world around us, and participatory political systems has granted us a power inaccessible to all previous generations of humans, at least for those people today with sufficient resources and privilege to exercise that power. I can influence animal welfare legislation in Denmark or Uganda from my desk in Australia.

[E]very moment of a human existence is completely shot through with the fact of what Heidegger calls our ‘finitude’. Our limited time isn’t just one among various things we have to cope with; rather, it’s the thing that defines us, as humans, before we start coping with anything at all. […] In this situation, any decision I make, to do anything at all with my time, is already radically limited.

— Oliver Burkeman 2021, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

But even with this astonishing power, when we consider the age of humanity (let alone Earth), the scale of the universe, the limited scale of our lives — our eighty odd years, if we’re blessed with a long life, out of the 13.8 billion years of the universe so far — is a joke.

We will always fail at almost everything. When you (the reader) and I are both dead and buried, animals will continue to suffer and die at the hands of industrial-scale abuse, children will continue to suffer and die in poverty, loving families will continue to be torn apart by state violence. If I work hard, I might be able to curb some of the excessive violence inflicted on, say, fish farmed in Uganda — but this will come at the expense of helping the hens in China or supporting the queer youth in sub-saharan Africa, let alone adopting rescue pigeons, or improving my goalkeeping skills, or opening my own funeral home, or getting all the tattoos I want.

Even if one adopts the tenets of effective altruism, which I do, and one aims to use their life to do the most good, “the most good” will still only ever be a drop in the ocean.

This is a guarantee, one of the precious few guarantees we get. (Burkeman: “[M]issing out on something – indeed, on almost everything – is basically guaranteed.”)

The world, in essence, is a joke — and moreover, a joke that cannot be solved by you or me.

Under this view, depression is not a symptom of a mood disorder, like major depressive disorder. Rather, depression arises from caring very much, having so much love to give, in a world built for neither care nor love.

And to be honest, I find this highly liberating. I am guaranteed to fail at most of the things I care most about. When I die, whether that is sooner or later, the world will keep on spinning, the universe will continue to expand, political systems will remain imperfect, animals will continue to suffer, people will continue to discriminate. In this realization, I feel a freedom. One can “be an observer”, as my tattoo artist likes to say, because one can only ever observe (as opposed to influence) 99.9999% of reality.

It seems to me that reality itself has a screw loose somewhere. That’s why I try to keep at least myself in line as much as possible.

— Haruki Murakami 2017, Killing Commendatore

I want to pause here to note an important caveat. I’ve written at length about my deep Christian faith. So, doesn’t this nihilism contradict the views at the heart of Christianity — that there is a God, that He is loving and all-powerful, that humans have an important role in the story of the universe?

Yes, there is a tension there. And I think that’s okay — “to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time”, and all that. Kelly M. Kapic’s 2022 book You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News explores this tension in detail, and Kapic comes to the conclusion that limitations and dependency are a gift from God and are good. I explore Kapic’s view in greater depth in my recent blog article here. Moreover, many books of the Bible — Ecclesiastes, Job, and more than a few Psalms — give us a written record of previous generations grappling with this exact tension.

The universe isn’t simply incomprehensibly vast — it is also incomprehensibly complex, as will be obvious to anybody who has studied international relations, or engaged in political science, or read history, or raised a child. At every level of organization — the international community, the nation state, the ecosystem, the family or friendship group, individual mind and physiology, cell biology, chemistry, particle physics — cause and effect rapidly decay into absolute cluelessness.

In the past, I’ve fallen into the trap of searching for a “general theory” that will, once and for all, explain my mental anguish and my neurodivergence and my behavior. Recently, it has dawned on me that there is no general theory — just countless facets of an infinitely complex gemstone (84,000 dharma doors, or ways to enter into the practice, as the Buddhists say). We can chip away at the gemstone and polish individual facets — and indeed, this is a highly worthy task — but there will never be a point where I sort my life out (another hat tip to Burkeman).

In terms of mental health, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a facet. Internal family systems (IFS) therapy is a facet. Antidepressant medication is a facet. Mindfulness meditation is a facet. The upward spiral is a facet (see Alex Korb 2015, The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time). None of them are a general theory, or a single idea that will, say, cure my mental illness. But they’re all worth practicing and pursuing.

For who knows what is good for mortals while they live the few days of their vain life, which they pass like a shadow?

— Ecclesiastes 6:12 NRSVUE

So, how should one live? Hell if I know.

But there are some directions that speak to me:

• Effective altruism — using empirical evidence to do the most good for sentient beings around the world, while knowing I will fail to actually fix things.
• Religion — living in relationship with my God and, perhaps just as important, participating in the traditions of my ancestors, while knowing I may never have answers to the biggest questions.
• Hedonism — not drinking and partying and going wild, but the bread, pot of cheese, and good company of Epicurus.
• Games — unnecessary contests staged purely for our enjoyment and pleasure, games we play for their own sake (see Steffen Borge 2019, The Philosophy of Football), while knowing I will never become a flawless goalkeeper.
• Art — similar to games, a practice done for its own sake. Reading lets me enjoy the fruits of other people’s imagination (fiction) or deep expertise and research (non-fiction). For me, art also takes the form of receiving tattoos — a way to represent my stories on my skin, which offers a “refuge of stability” in an age of liquid modernity (Chris William Martin 2018, The Social Semiotics of Tattoos: Skin and Self).

Again, no one of these things is the only important thing. There is no general theory — these are all facets of a gem, doors into a meaningful life.

“… the math doesn’t matter, because you love it, and because it’s our way.”

— Becky Chambers 2018, Record of a Spaceborn Few

• “The real problem […] isn’t that we’re bad at prioritising the big rocks. It’s that there are too many rocks – and most of them are never making it anywhere near that jar. The critical question isn’t how to differentiate between activities that matter and those that don’t, but what to do when far too many things feel at least somewhat important, and therefore arguably qualify as big rocks.”
• “[A]ny attempt to bring our ideas into concrete reality must inevitably fall short of our dreams, no matter how brilliantly we succeed in carrying things off – because reality, unlike fantasy, is a realm in which we don’t have limitless control, and can’t possibly hope to meet our perfectionist standards. […] judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job. So you might as well make a start.”
• “[T]ime just feels realer – more intense, more vivid, more filled with meaning – when you’re synchronised well with others. […] synchrony is also a portal to another dimension – to that sacred place where the boundaries of the self grow fuzzy, and time seems not to exist. I’ve felt it as a member of a community choir, when the sharp and flat tones of amateur voices combine into a perfection that few of the singers involved could attain on their own.”

From You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News by Kelly M. Kapic:

• “Our limitations are a gift from God”
• “Our dependency […] takes concrete form when we rely on others, on the earth, on institutions and traditions. We must learn the value and truthfulness of our finitude, eventually getting to the point where we might even praise God for our limits.” [emphasis mine because I think that’s such a profound statement]
• “God designed the person for the community and the community for the person. What is impossible for the particular Christian becomes possible for the church as Christ’s body”
• “We tend to admire the driven individual who seeks personal triumph more than we do the relational person who is embedded within a community. […] But the story of the isolated hero is much easier to tell than the complicated narrative of community and mutual relations, so we focus on the superheroes.”

From The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time by Alex Korb:

• “Depression is an isolating disease. It makes you feel separate and alone, even around other people, and this often makes people want to be physically separate. But that desire for solitude is just a symptom of the depressed brain, and it perpetuates the disease […] even though you may feel like being alone, the cure to depression often lies in other people.”
• “Humans are a social species—we evolved to survive with each other, and our brains are healthiest when we interact with and feel connected to others.”

Likewise, Meadow DeVor’s book The Worthy Mind identifies “taking steps to invest in community” as one ingredient in a much larger pathway for stepping into self-worth.

Sarah J. Robinson cautions: “People can’t heal me, but I need them anyway.” Community, in itself, does not make you worthy or valuable. You (the person reading this) are already worthy and valuable beyond measure. But that immeasurable value comes from elsewhere — call it the intrinsic worth of every sentient being, or the grace of God, or fundamental human value, or whatever you will.

In a recent blog post, I discussed how the age of artificial intelligence is changing advocacy and what it means to do the most good. I identified five areas where humans still have (and are likely to keep) serious advantages over computers. Four of these are: take responsibility and accountability for high-stakes decisions; develop deep, specific context about projects; share an authentic lived experience; and do things in the physical world.

It’s noteworthy that these four skills so strongly involve community. In that article, I wrote that I am “shifting from a mindset of individual action (taking the individual actions that do the most good) to the organization and movement level (supporting larger units to take collective actions that do the most good). […] This also supports a more low-key lifestyle and work-life balance — it doesn’t matter as much how much work or output that you get out of each workday, as the more important thing is supporting collectives to take sound, careful action.”

And thank God for that — imagine if all of the various and profound problems of the world were resting on your shoulders, or on the shoulders of any individual. Good grief!

Update 2026-04-24

From A Testament of Devotion: Five Quaker Essays on Finding Inner Peace Through God’s Presence and Simplification by Thomas R. Kelly (1941):

• • But it is a particularization of my responsibility also, in a world too vast and a lifetime too short for me to carry all responsibilities. My cosmic love, or the Divine Lover loving within me, cannot accomplish its full intent, which is universal saviourhood, within the limits of three score years and ten. But the Loving Presence does not burden us equally with all things, but considerately puts upon each of us just a few central tasks, as emphatic responsibilities. For each of us these special undertakings are our share in the joyous burdens of love. Thus the state of having a concern has a foreground and a background. In the foreground is the special task, uniquely illuminated, toward which we feel a special yearning and care. […] But in the background is a second level, or layer, of universal concern for all the multitude of good things that need doing. Toward them all we feel kindly, but we are dismissed from active service in most of them. And we have an easy mind in the presence of desperately real needs which are not our direct responsibility. We cannot die on every cross, nor are we expected to.

I’ve been thinking about my career given given that AI is getting so so good.

I’ve spent some time thinking about where the human premium lies. I used Gemini to help me reflect on this, and I also asked some colleagues whom I deeply trust. It’s also important to look forward as AI continues to develop over the coming months and years — there’s no point focusing on some area X today if we think AI will master X next week.

In summary, the (robust) human premium seems to be:

1. Responsibility and accountability for high-stakes moral or financial decisions.
2. Deep, specific context (e.g. highly niche information, local cultural practices, subtle cues in a messy environment).
3. Black-swan creativity / paradigm shifts (e.g. Einstein’s shift from classical physics to general relativity, moving fully outside of existing thought).
4. Authentic lived experience and a shared human experience (e.g. empathy, trust).
5. Doing things in the physical world.

These definitely support animal advocacy roles including:

• Grantmaking.
• Movement or organization strategy. Probably not research per se, but rather movement deliberation and strategic decision-making.
• Corporate or political engagement.
• Fieldwork. There’s an interesting tension here as many countries in the Global South, which are the highest priority countries for advocacy, are also often the countries where it’s illegal or dangerous to be queer.
• Regime shifts in thinking.
• Supporting advocates, e.g. via counselling and therapy.

Part 2 - Related evolutions in my thinking

There are two related shifts in my mindset that I have been contemplating:

• Shifting from a mindset of quantitative “production efficiency” to a mindset of qualitative “careful action”. Over the past few years, my mental split of quantitative production efficiency vs qualitative careful action has been ~80/20. But given some arbitrary task, AI seems better than humans at executing that task efficiently - that is to say, the human premium no longer lies in the realm of maximizing efficiency, but these slower, more deliberate skills. So I think the optimal mix is shifting to closer to 20/80.
• Shifting from a mindset of individual action (taking the individual actions that do the most good) to the organization and movement level (supporting larger units to take collective actions that do the most good). I’ve been contemplating this for a few years, and recently discussed this idea with someone from THL: it’s reasonable to measure impact at the level of an org, but probably not any finer-detail than that (e.g., impact of each individual employee).

So, generally, this represents a shift from quantitative productivity at the individual level to qualitative sound action at the collective level.

This also supports a more low-key lifestyle and work-life balance — it doesn’t matter as much how much work or output that you get out of each workday, as the more important thing is supporting collectives to take sound, careful action. It also aligns with the fact that as I age, productivity will necessarily give way, but in return I will develop wisdom and experience.

• The first post offered some brief notes on insect abundance in artificial turf sports pitches (as opposed to grass pitches).
• The second post made some rough calculations to estimate the number of insect killed by driving.
• The third post applies those calculations to a specific decision in my life: choosing which of two soccer clubs I should play at for the 2026 season.

Content warning: This post describes animal suffering.

In the previous posts in this series, I have offered some scientific evidence and reasoning to explore whether two activities — driving and stepping on grass — kill large numbers of insects. My rough calculations (see the third post), which estimated the number of insects killed by driving and stepping on grass in my own life, resulted in estimates in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of insects.

I think it’s worth pausing here, because that is quite a strong claim. A very routine activity — driving to soccer and having a kickaround with my teammates — is potentially costing millions of lives.

Is that really true?

If my estimates are approximately correct, and these activities are indeed costing millions of lives, then that is big news. If you assign even a fairly low moral weight to the lives of an insect — perhaps in the ballpark of ~1% of the value of a human, as some of my colleagues have tentatively accepted based on [Rethink Priorities’ research] — then this every day activity represents an ongoing moral catastrophe.

Is this everyday, mundane activity really a moral catastrophe? Is having a kickaround in the park really as bad as mass murder?

I think it’s worth exercising caution. Sometimes, when you cry wolf, there is no wolf.

History has plenty of examples of people who thought there was a moral catastrophe when there actually wasn’t. Fundamentalists often delude themselves into thinking that there is something really, really bad happening, when actually there is not. Examples include the decline of a particular religion or set of religious practices; demographic change/immigration; women being granted the right to have abortions; and other social groups receiving increased rights. People have killed others, and continue to kill others, to stop these perceived moral catastrophes. Clearly, this level of fundamentalism involves delusion, not an actual moral catastrophe.

For sure, there actually are ongoing moral catastrophes that most of society don’t know or don’t care about — just visit any slaughterhouse. Eating a bacon and egg sandwich, another everyday, routine activity, really is as bad as murder. Sometimes, when you cry wolf, there actually is a wolf. An unrecognized moral catastrophe also makes for a great plot in the Dr Seuss book Horton Hears a Who!.

But in the case of the bacon and egg sandwich, it’s easy to find the dead bodies. You can track down and visit the slaughterhouse where piglets are killed to produce that bacon, and you can go and see hens actually forced to endure being cramped into tiny cages non-stop for over a year to produce those eggs. Most professional philosophers believe that factory farming is wrong (see endnote 1 here).

What about with insects? In my third post in this series, I gave some published scientific evidence that supports the hypothesis that walking on grass kills insects. But this evidence isn’t conclusive. Nobody has published a study where they systematically look for all the bodies of insects killed by stepping on grass and conclusively rule out all alternative hypotheses (e.g., other causes of death).

What if we applied common sense to this question? If you asked the general public whether they thought having a kickaround in the park is good or bad, most would tell you something like “Sure, it’s good fun” or “Yeah, great way to exercise and make friends”. Some particularly well-informed people might even say something like “While casual sport has many physical, emotional, and social benefits, many disadvantaged socio-economic groups face systemic barriers to participation and to use of green spaces, so it’s important to remove those barriers”. Nobody would tell you “Absolutely do NOT do that, you’ll kill millions of insects! Are you insane?!”.

The general public are wrong about plenty of things. Common sense is definitely not an absolute measure of empirical truth or moral wisdom.

So, we are in a position where we have hypothesized the existence of a moral catastrophe, based on circumstantial but inconclusive evidence, and basically nobody else would agree that this is a moral catastrophe. It is worth being very careful with the strength of claims we can make — there might actually be a moral catastrophe, but it is also possible that I’m deluded and that the common sense view is the correct one.

How can we tell the difference? We need to find conclusive evidence. In the case of factory farming, you can go to a slaughterhouse and see the dead bodies. Likewise, is there a way to obtain evidence about the numbers of insects killed by walking on grass/driving? We would need to demonstrate two things, in a way that is convincing to skeptics:

1. That there are thousands or millions of insects crawling around in the grass / flying around traffic.
2. That walking on the grass / driving kills thousands or millions of these insects. In other words, once you’re done walking around on the grass or driving to the shops and back, you should be able to point to those thousands or millions of dead bodies.

If we can demonstrate those two things, then we may be justified in believing that walking on grass or driving constitutes a moral catastrophe. Until we have demonstrated those two things, it is worth exercising caution due to the risk of falling into delusion.

• The first post offered some brief notes on insect abundance in artificial turf sports pitches (as opposed to grass pitches).
• The second post made some rough calculations to estimate the number of insect killed by driving.
• The fourth post gives some common sense reason why this entire line of reasoning might be silly.

Summary

• In this post, I highlight two ways that everyday life can cause direct suffering to sentient animals: by hitting insects with the car while driving, and by stepping on grass where invertebrates live.
• While the evidence base isn’t perfect, I offer some rough calculations for the numbers of invertebrates killed by both of these processes. I apply those calculations to a specific decision in my life: choosing which of two soccer clubs I should play at for the 2026 season.
• All else being equal, playing at a club that trains and plays on artificial turf rather than grass probably kills fewer insects (in the ballpark of a million insects or so). Likewise, playing at a club that is closer to my house and/or catching the bus probably kills fewer insects (in the ballpark of tens of thousands of insects or so).

(In this post, I use the words “insect” and “invertebrate” mostly interchangeably. The correct term is “invertebrate”, a broader group of animals that also includes non-insect critters like spiders and slaters. But most of the invertebrates you see in your day-to-day life are insects, and more non-expert readers will be familiar with the term “insect”, so I have mostly used that term for this post.)

Driving distance

The first thing to consider is driving distance. In a previous blog post, I concluded that if you drive for 1 km, you can expect to hit ~1.5 - 90 insects with your car, though there is significant variation around that estimate.

This means that, all else being equal, a nearby soccer club is preferable to a distant club.

Some clubs play home matches at a ground separate from their training ground, so we need to consider both the home ground and the training ground. Also, you can expect to drive to the training ground (around once a week throughout the season) more frequently than the home ground (around once a fortnight throughout the season, as half of all matches are away at other clubs).

For the 2026 season, I’m choosing between two clubs: Club A and Club B. These are actual clubs near my house, but I’ve given them fake names because I’m posting this online. As a comparison, I’ll also consider futsal—as this is indoors and usually in a single location throughout the season, this would be form of soccer least likely to hurt insects.

Club A

• Training: 1.4 km from my house
• Home matches: 1.4 km from my house
• Away matches: Variable distance from 1.4 km to 30 km, with most within the 5-15 km range

Club B

• Training: 7.1 km from my house
• Home matches: 4.3 km from my house
• Away matches: Variable distance from 1.4 km to 30 km, with most within the 5-15 km range

Futsal:

• Training (if any): 6.5 km from my house
• Matches: 6.5 km from my house

We can assume a season of ~25 trainings and ~22 matches (split equally between home matches and away matches), though futsal would likely have more like ~3 trainings at most. For those variable away matches, I’m comfortable assuming an average distance of 8 km.

Thus, distance travelled throughout the season for each club (each trip is multiplied by 2, as I need to drive home after soccer!):

Club A:
\((25\times2\times 1.4) + (11\times2\times 1.4) + (11\times2\times 8)\)
\(= ~280 km\)

Club B:
\((25\times2\times 7.1) + (11\times2\times 4.3) + (11\times2\times 8)\)
\(= ~630 km\)

Futsal:
\((3\times2\times 6.5) + (22\times2\times 6.5)\)
\(= ~330 km\)

This indicates that playing for Club A would cause me to drive ~280 km throughout the season, Club B ~630 km, and Futsal ~330 km.

There are two caveats that apply to me personally.

1. My wife has agreed to play and coach for Club A already. This means that, from the perspective of my own personal decision-making, driving to Club A for trainings and matches is “free”—I simply hop in the car that my wife will be driving there anyway.
2. I could catch a bus rather than driving to Futsal, and possibly to the trainings and home matches for Club B.

This means that, if I take all possible actions to reduce my driving distance, then the distance driven throughout the season would be more like:

Club A (driving with wife):
\(= 0 km\)

Club B (using bus where possible):
\((11\times2\times 8)\)
\(= ~180 km\)

Futsal (using bus):
\(= 0 km\)

And since we have previously estimated that a car hits ~1.5 - 90 insects per km, we can calculate the number of insects who are hit by my car due to each choice. In practice, I think it’s certain that I would drive with my wife for Club A; it’s possible but not guaranteed that I would use the bus where possible for Club B; and it’s likely that I would use the bus for Futsal. So:

Club A (driving with wife):
\(= 0 insects\)

Club B (driving):
\(630\times (1.5 to 90)\)
\(= ~950 to ~57,000 insects\)

Club B (using bus where possible):
\(180\times (1.5 to 90)\)
\(= ~300 to ~16,000 insects\)

Futsal (using bus):
\(= 0 insects\)

So, for me personally, I can expect to hit with my car:

• 0 insects if I play for Club A
• 0 insects if I play Futsal
• ~950 - 57,000 insects if I play for Club B and drive
• ~300 - ~16,000 insects if I play for Club B and use the bus where possible

Stepping on grass

Some soccer pitches are made of real grass, while others are made of artificial turf. Club A’s pitches are real grass, while Club B’ pitches are artificial turf.

In a previous blog post, I began to explore whether there is a difference in the number of insects who live in grass versus artificial turf.

If there are more insects living in real grass than in artificial turf, then stepping on real grass is likely to crush more insects than stepping on artificial turf. If this is the case, then it might be morally preferable to play for a club that has artificial pitches.

Why player caps are not important

A caveat: during a soccer match, there are always exactly 11 players from any given team on the pitch. You could argue that this specific team size means that a single player doesn’t actually cause any additional grass-stepping, as you’re really just adding +1 player to the bench rather than the pitch. But I think this conclusion is wrong for three reasons.
1) This doesn’t apply to training, where there are no caps on the number of people participating at any one time.
2) Even a bench player warms up, walks on the grass while hanging out at the sideline, and so on.
3) In rare instances, adding a player to a team will actually cause the team to split into two teams, which would drastically increase grass-stepping.

So, I think it’s fair to treat +1 player on a team as simply +1 person stepping on the grass.

Estimates of insect numbers in grass

This means that the important question is: how many invertebrates live in the grass of soccer pitches?

While answering this question, it’s important to keep in mind that soccer pitches are not the same as grass in general. Soccer pitches receive very heavy foot traffic and are often treated heavily with pesticide, mowed regularly, sprayed with paint, and so on. This means that estimates of invertebrate numbers in other grassy areas (e.g., “natural” areas, backyard grass, etc) might not be representative of soccer pitches.

With that caveat in mind, here are some rough numbers of invertebrate abundance in grass from published ecological surveys. There’s lots of variation because different surveys used different methods in different parts of the world. Also, this is just a haphazard collection of papers I found using an informal search on Google Scholar rather than a systematic literature review (which would take weeks). But most surveys actually seem to give answers in the same ballpark.

Estimates from inside Australia:

• ~460 insects in each trap, with three traps per 3.6 m² plot, suggesting ~380 insects/m² figure 1a
• An average of 2,865 insects were found by sampling mostly unmanaged grasslands - the area sampled is unclear, but this project is particularly relevant as it was conducted near where I live https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1155/2014/202056 table 4
• 40,897 invertebrates found in 20x 0.25 m² plots in parks in New Zealand (which isn’t in Australia, but close enough) - indicating ~8,200 invertebrates/m² https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11252-025-01728-0.pdf table 2

Estimates from outside of Australia:

• 44k - 6M insects in a 0.2 acre lawn, indicating ~55 - 7,500 insects/m²
• 45,447 insects were found from ~11 circles of ~3m diameter, indicating ~1,600 insects/m² in short rye grass in England (an underestimate due to the methdology) (Table 4.4, control group)
• Several thousand insects were found in the average ~112m² plot of experimentally managed grassland in the United States, indicating dozens or hundreds of insects/m², though it’s hard to give an exact number due to the methodology
• ~100 - 200 insects per 0.36 m² turf plot in England, indicating ~420 insects/m² (though this was over multiple sampling periods?) (Figure 1A)
• An average of ~1,000 invertebrates recorded per domestic urban garden in England, though the area sampled is unclear
• 271 bees, wasps, and flower flies found in residential lawn in Canada, though area is unclear (Table 2)
• ~35 invertebrates in each sample of soil in urban tree habitat, not really useful for us except for the finding that inteverbrate abundance was higher 1-2 cm deep in the soil than 0-1 cm deep.

So, most studies generally indicate several hundred to several thousand invertebrates per m² of grass.

Estimates of insect numbers in artificial turf

In my previous blog post, I complained that no published study—at least as far as I could tell—had measured the abundance of invertebrates in artificial turf. Most authors agree, based on ecological theory and anecdotal observations, that the abundance of invertebrates would be lower in artificial turf than in grass. But nobody has tested this empirically.

Estimates of insect numbers indoors

I assume that there are zero, or very few, insects living on indoor Futsal pitches. It’s possible that there are a few insects who find their way indoors. But I think that a) these will be very few, and b) the number is probably comparable to the number of insects hanging around in my own kitchen, which is likely where I’ll be hanging out if I don’t play any sport!

How much grass might you crush while playing soccer?

So we’ve got some reasonable estimates for invertebrates in each m² of soccer pitch. But we need to convert this to numbers of insects crushed.

My feet are size 11 UK / 12 US in men’s sizes. This means the sole measures around 30 cm long and around 10 cm wide; that is, 0.03 m².

How many times do I step on the ground while playing soccer? Two internet users here indicate ~10,000 - 20,000 steps.

Professional men’s goalkeepers cover ~5 km in a match (source). I’m neither professional nor a man, but I do like to wander pretty far out of my penalty box to protect my team from through-balls—so let’s call this 3 km. If my average stride is 80 cm, then this equates to ~3,800 steps per match. I’m ignoring the fact that I often fall into the ground (which means more area covered).

This means that I can expect to step on:
\(3,800\times 0.03\)\(\)= 1,125 m² $$

What about during training rather than a match? Honestly, I think the estimate would be fairly similar. I work very hard in training — sometimes, I work harder in training than in the match itself. Trainings also last for a similar amount of time (80-90 minutes). So, I think it’s fair to assume that the number of steps at training will be the same as the number of steps in a match.

Bringing it all together

If I step on a particular section of grass, would I kill all the insects in that grass? Probably not. I have no idea what percentage I would kill. I think it’s less than all of them, but more than none of them. As a guess based on my intuition, let’s call it 5%.

Therefore, we can combine our estimates of ~1,000 insects/m², 1,125 m² covered/match, and 5% of insects crushed:
\(= 1,125 \times 1,000 \times 5%\)
\(= ~50,000\)

That is, ~50,000 grass-dwelling insects crushed per match.

For Club A, over our season of ~25 trainings and ~22 matches (assuming that ~4 of those matches are played away at artificial pitches), this is equivalent to:
\(50,000\times (25 + 18)\)
\(= ~2,000,000\)

For Club B, if we restrict our attention to just the matches played on grass, we can expect to play 9 away matches (11 away matches in total, minus ~2 that are played at other clubs’ artificial piches):
\(50,000\times 9\)
\(= ~450,000\)

That is, playing for Club A would crush around 2 million grass-dwelling insects insects by walking on grass throughout the season. For Club B, this number is more like 450 thousand.

This is highly sensitive to the input assumptions, especially that ~5% guess for the number of insects crushed by stepping on grass.

It’s also possible that most insects are crushed very early during a match and subsequent steps are only crushing already-dead insects. If this is true, then my above estimate will be too high.

Now, we can combine these numbers with our earlier estimates of insects killed by driving:

• Club A: 0 insects hit by car + ~2 million grass-dwelling insects crushed underfoot = ~2 million insects in total
• Club B (if I drive): ~950 - 57,000 insects hit by car + ~450,000 grass-dwelling insects crushed underfoot = ~480,000 insects in total
• Club B (if I use the bus where possible): ~300 - 16,000 insects hit by car + ~450,000 grass-dwelling insects crushed underfoot = ~460,000 insects in total
• Futsal: 0 insects hit by car + 0 grass-dwelling insects crushed underfoot

Currently, Club A looks worst, followed by Club B, with Futsal obviously coming out on top.

But those numbers do not include artificial-turf-dwelling insects who are crushed underfoot. In what situation would Club A look better than Club B? For this to happen, the number of artificial-turf-dwelling insects crushed underfoot would need to reach the ballpark of ~1.5 million, which is 75% of the number of grass-dwelling insects crushed underfoot while playing for Club A. Using the same assumptions around distance travelled and foot size above, that condition is met if the abundance of insects in artificial turf is at least ~75% the abundance of insects in grass.

However, it is probably true that artificial turf contains less than ~75% the abundance of insects in real grass, at least if you accept the anecdotal experience and ecological theory that passes for empirical evidence on this topic.

But this hypothesis is also pretty easy to test—all you have to do is take a microscope camera to an artifical turf pitch (as well as a grass pitch for comparison) and record some footage of the invertebrates, if any, who live on/in the ground. I have a microscope camera, so I will in fact test this hypothesis—but since I must time my trip well in order to access the artificial turf pitch near my house, this will need to wait for a future blog article.

Counterpoint: Does stepping on grass actually kill bugs?

An underlying assumption for this whole analysis is whether stepping on grass actually kills bugs or not.

I think the answer is: Yes, stepping on grass kills bugs. But I’m not 100% sure—while the weight of the evidence base seems to point towards that conclusion, I haven’t yet seen the “smoking gun” evidence.

Much of the discussion on this question is anecdotal. Adherents of the religion Jainism avoid stepping on grass precisely because they think that doing so crushes insects, as Jains usually practice non-violence (an attitude and lifestyle that I wholeheartedly endorse). There are also many online forums, often debating veganism, where forum users argue about whether or not stepping on grass kills bugs—there seems to be a general agreement that stepping on grass kills bugs at least sometimes, but as is often the case in online debates, empirical evidence is not forthcoming.

Some relevant empirical sources are:

• Ciach et al 2017 found lots of crushed invertebrates on hiking trails, indicating that stepping on bugs can directly kill them. The trails were “covered with a mixture of soil, rock or rock debris, and natural vegetation was present adjacent to the path” - so they’re not grass trails, but there is grass on the side of the path.
• Ayres et al 2008 looked at invertebrates in Antarctica (obviously not representative for sports pitches!) and found that trampling increased the ratio of dead-to-living invertebrates. This doesn’t rule out decreased breeding rather than increased deaths, as the authors point out.
• Duffy (1975) showed that trampling on grassland litter (not the same thing as a sports pitch, but similar) causes a decline in the abundance of invertebrates. This is consistent with the hypothesis that trampling on grass directly kills invertebrates. However, it’s also possible that the observed decline in abundance is due to other factors, such as less resource or space availability meaning that insects breed less, rather than being killed directly.
• This environmental impact assessment from a Scottish transport company (?) addresses invertebrates: “Trampling by humans can also cause direct mortality […].”

So, the weight of the evidence pushes me towards accepting that stepping on grass indeed directly kills insects. But this isn’t a slam-dunk; it’s possible that stepping on grass doesn’t actually kill insects, as I haven’t yet seen a direct empirical test of this hypothesis.

Is it good to kill insects if it decreases their population, and thus causes fewer insects to be born? Brian Tomasik seems to think so (if I’ve interpreted his views correctly). I generally have a lot of respect for Tomasik’s work, and I endorse many of his views. But I don’t endorse this paticular view, or at least not strongly. This hinges on some very murky areas of philosophy and welfare science, such as which moral theory is correct, whether anti-natalism is correct, and whether wild insects live “net good” or “net bad” lives in aggregate (or whether such a question is even coherent to ask). Much debate has raged about such questions. Currently, I don’t feel confident enough in any such argument to endorse the view that it’s good to kill insects in order to decrease their population size.