Summary
This piece explains reasons why I personally tend not to travel. I find long-distance travel uncomfortable and tiring, and I tend to not find meeting people in meatspace much better than in cyberspace. Many of these reasons are specific to me and are not arguments against travel in general.
Contents
Costs of travel
Motion sickness
When I was maybe ~6 years old, I read a picture book to myself in the back seat of a moving car. After about 10 minutes of doing so, I noticed that I felt a bit sick to my stomach and stopped reading. This was maybe my first realization that I get motion-sick trying to read while moving. A few years later, I tried playing my Nintendo Game Boy on a car ride, thinking that maybe it was different from reading because my eyes wouldn't move back and forth. This too was a mistake, and I spent the next ~45 minutes of the trip clenching the car door in pain in response to nausea.
Even without reading, I can feel motion-sick on long car rides or plane flights. As of 2019, I've never vomited due to motion sickness; I'm pretty good about keeping myself under control. But there have been many trips where motion sickness has caused me to squirm in discomfort for long periods of time.
To reduce motion sickness, I avoid eating for at least ~5 hours before a long car ride and ~8 hours before a plane flight, and I don't eat during the whole trip. This means I'm often somewhat hungry or at least mentally fatigued during travel. On a return trip from Germany to Seattle in 2012, I didn't eat for 30 hours in a row.
I can listen to podcasts while traveling, but often after an hour or two of them, I find it harder to focus on the material than I would if I were more comfortable and less hungry.
On plane flights I take Dramamine, which helps a lot, though it also makes me tired. That can be good in the rare cases where I manage to fall asleep, but usually I can't fall asleep because I can't lie down, and I may be too hungry or stressed to sleep anyway. So I often spend several hours of a plane flight resting with my eyes closed but without actually getting much rest from it.
When I was exploring career options in college, I ruled out consulting pretty quickly because it required significant travel. Being a business executive at a company that had offices in more than one city also seemed incompatible with my aversion to flying.
Inconveniences
Motion sickness is a primary reason I dislike travel, especially trips requiring plane flight. However, I also find travel inconvenient in lots of less significant ways.
During my adult life, especially since college, I've found that the hours during which I'm awake often creep forward slowly over time. Some weeks I'm awake during the day, and during other weeks I've shifted so that I'm awake all night. I haven't found a way to prevent this from happening other than to use an alarm clock at the same time every day, and doing that would mean I would often wake up while still feeling tired. (Even in cases when I have been forced to wake up at the same time every day, my sleep rhythm finds ways to mess things up. For example, due to waking up early to an alarm clock, I might be so tired during the day that I have to nap, and then I find myself sleeping half during the day and half at night.) Because my waking hours are unpredictable and uncontrollable, while the departure time for a trip is fixed in advance, I may end up needing to leave for the trip right about when I would have gone to bed. Yet, due to the stress of traveling, I often can't sleep during the drive or flight. So I may end up staying awake for a long time, which messes up my sleep rhythm.
Traveling requires thinking about all the items you may need on your trip, and packing them takes me a while, since I want to be careful not to forget anything important. And during the trip, I worry about forgetting items, especially valuable ones, so I often feel the need to check that I haven't misplaced anything. (My habit of checking that I haven't forgotten things comes from experiences where I have forgotten things. For example, I once locked myself out of my apartment due to leaving the key inside, and at another time, I did the same for my office building.)
Staying overnight with other people can sometimes be awkward. For example: How much noise can I can make without waking them up? What are their standards for keeping the bathroom and kitchen clean? Do they mind if I use their shampoo? Staying in hotels may be somewhat less awkward, though it's more expensive and comes with its own set of downsides, such as the possibility of bed bugs in the bed.
At home, I have a treadmill desk that allows me to walk while working. (I only walk for 1-2 hours per day, while I stand still for most of the rest of the time.) It's unlikely the place where I stay while traveling will have a treadmill desk. Large hotels often have exercise rooms, though their quality may not be great, and it may be hard to listen to podcasts while someone else has the TV on.
I prefer to eat meals containing a sizeable volume of vegetables. If the people I'm staying with don't already have a lot of vegetables they're willing to share, I need to find a grocery store in order to buy them. But doing that can sometimes be challenging if you don't have a car. When I visited Munich, Germany, for two weeks in 2012, I was never able to find a store within walking distance of my hotel at which I could buy vegetables, despite searching online a bit and asking one or two people. I had to get all my meals at restaurants or food stands, but food at these places was more expensive than at a grocery store. I wasn't able to buy much in the way of vegetables except, ironically, at Burger King, which sold salads, if I recall correctly.
In general, traveling and staying somewhere other than home requires numerous little adjustments, inconveniences, or new arrangements that you have to figure out. I suppose this is mildly useful in terms of teaching you some new things about the world, but I don't think the skills I've learned from the hassles of travel have been especially significant.
Other
Not traveling saves money and greenhouse-gas emissions.
When you stay at home, you're less likely to be mugged, or have your phone or passport snatched out of your pocket.
Medical care is more burdensome to access when you're away from home.
In the very unlikely event that your house floods or burns down while you're away, you're out of luck. In contrast, if you're home when those things happen, you may be able to save your most important possessions.
If you have a pet, s/he may be very worried by your absence, perhaps not knowing whether you'll ever come back. This could be a very distressing several days or weeks for the pet.
Avoiding physical interaction with other people means you're unlikely to catch someone else's infection or spread an infection to others. This point gained widespread recognition during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic of 2020, when "social distancing" and staying home were recommended and even required by governments. That said, one can make an argument that in non-pandemic situations it may be good to be exposed to some amount of germs to build immunity.
I don't find travel particularly valuable
The costs of travel are sometimes worth bearing. As an extreme example, it's often worth traveling to see a dying relative. However, in many cases I find that travel is not particularly meaningful.
Meeting people "in real life" is fun, but so is meeting them online. For me, face-to-face conversations can be mostly substituted by phone calls, emails, and forum discussions. If you want the feeling of "just hanging out with friends", I find that certain types of conversational YouTube videos are a good substitute, and I guess there are more interactive ways to chat online as well.
Conference presentations are cool, but I can just watch them online, at my own pace, and without needing to sit still in a chair.
I enjoy visiting museums, but I don't find it special to see an object "in person" relative to seeing a photo or video of it. Indeed, if you see the object online, you can Google for more information about it as much as desired. After 2 to 3 hours browsing around a museum, I often get somewhat fatigued and can't concentrate as well as I'd like. When you learn online, you can do so in bite-sized chunks and switch to other things when you get tired. You can later return to your online learning without needing to physically return to the museum and pay to enter it again.
In general, I find that digital text, audio, and video can largely reproduce most of the sensory and intellectual experiences that traveling could provide. If you want interactivity, you could add video games and chatting online to that list. Hanson (2009): "Video games and movies today already offer much of the gains that virtual reality have to offer." I don't care much about tastes or smells, so their current absence from cyberspace isn't troubling to me. I agree with Edward Snowden when he says: "As long as I have a screen and an Internet connection I was pretty happy" (Snowden 2019 at 2h06m37s).
Why I generally don't give presentations
In 8th grade I became interested in activism to improve the world. I figured that public speaking was an important part of being a good activist. So over the next few years, I tried to become less shy and more willing to speak my mind, even in front of a classroom full of people. In 11th grade, I took a half-year elective class on public speaking at my high school, to force myself to practice the art even more than I already did through occasional presentations required in other courses.
As time went on and the Internet became more central to activism, I realized that maybe being good at public speaking wasn't as essential as I had thought. There do need to be some figures within a movement who can deliver strong speeches and television interviews. But many members of a movement can produce content in other ways. I guess this has always been true, but it's even more true today because in cyberspace, a lot of communication is written rather than spoken, and even spoken communication doesn't necessarily have to be delivered live in front of an audience. I find that producing spoken content on my own for uploading to the web is not intimidating at all, unlike speaking to a room full of people.
I have occasionally given lectures on effective-altruism topics. Doing this is usually less scary than delivering presentations in high school was, partly because there's less pressure for me to do things "in the right way". If I'm a bit awkward or imperfect in my presentation, the other geeks in the room are likely to be pretty forgiving about that.
Nonetheless, I still find presentations somewhat stressful. Actually, during the presentation itself, I'm often "in the zone" and having fun, but for a few days leading up to it, I'm somewhat anxious from time to time. Presentations to a large audience (say, more than 30 people) would be particularly stressful, which is why I don't think I've ever done such a thing other than in the form of coming up to the stage during an award ceremony or graduation.
Being somewhat intimidated by public speaking is the main reason I've never done a lecture at Effective Altruism Global conferences. Two smaller reasons are
- I don't necessarily feel I have a lot to say. If I have ideas to share, I've already written about them on my website, and I don't necessarily want to repeat myself.
- Some of my ideas about reducing suffering are weird or controversial, and I don't want to associate a relatively public-facing event too much with my idiosyncracies. And because I don't associate myself too much with those more mainstream venues, I feel more free to be weird without worrying about how it affects other parties.
In the cases where I have given lectures, I didn't find that the response to them was significantly different from the response to text articles on my website. Perhaps the value of a recorded lecture available on YouTube is comparable to the value of one or two written articles. But writing articles is less stressful for me, so I'd rather mainly do that. For this reason, combined with disliking travel, I almost always decline invitations to be a speaker (although I'm invariably honored to be invited).
By the late 2010s and early 2020s, the fields of wild-animal welfare and s-risks became larger, and I was no longer able to keep up with all the work being done in those areas. I was also doing less research of my own on these topics. So another reason I don't do as many interviews these days is because I may not know a lot of the most current ideas and would be less informed about these topics than other people would be.
It's much easier to be accurate when writing than when speaking, and written text is more amenable to being edited if you later update your views, discover new information, or want to remove a faux pas. On the other hand, conversational-style speeches are often easier to digest than dense writing, and it can be fun to hear a speaker's voice and see his/her mannerisms. For this reason, I appreciate the fact that other people do interviews and presentations.
The main reason I used to do some lectures and interviews on effective-altruism topics was because people asked me to, and I didn't want to say no. I also thought I had some moral obligation to get my message out to wider audiences. By the late 2010s and early 2020s, I'm now more inclined to just say no to an offer if I wouldn't actually enjoy doing it. I seem to recall someone else making a similar point—that when he got to a certain age, he decided he was a "grown-ass man" and didn't have to accept invitations out of obligation. A similar thing applies when people invite me to parties or other events. In the past I might have attended to avoid making them feel bad, but now I'm ok with just declining the offer, because usually I find it a hassle to attend events, and I might be busy at the time anyway. I think school trained me on the idea that I had to do things other people requested even if I didn't want to, and since then I've unlearned that to some extent.