By dkl9, written 2025-202, revised 2025-202 (0 revisions)
I try to follow my own advice for how to wash hands, but in the opposite direction from usual. If left to habit and intuition, I'd wash my hands very slowly and tediously. Despite what this pattern suggests, I don't actually enjoy handwashing. Thus I treat washing as an expensive action, and wash infrequently.
Sith I've qualms about hygiene, I arrange what I do so that I have clean hands when needed. I assign to each object or action a "level" of dirtiness:
You should have hands at most as dirty as the object before you interact with it — so goes the reasoning here — and after the interaction, the hands are about as dirty as the object. To better follow the first rule, I act between hand-washes in order of increasing dirtiness. Activity "cleaner" than what I just did gets postponed to after I next wash almost always gets postponed to after I next urinate or defecate.
This may be crazy, but it's not OCD. Should my hands get acutely dirty, I don't panic or compulsively wash. I just refuse to do most things until I wash as next opportune. If the rules are broken, I don't concretely fear disease. The rules are far abstracted from such worries.
The dirtiness-ranking list above includes only a limited set of salient things. The world has other things with their respective dirtiness-levels. In any case, such extra details are moot. I generally merge these exact levels into a few broader classes:
Hygiene is more complex than one dimension like this. To account for this complexity, realise that some things expect clean (ish) hands but lead to more dirty (ish) hands. Surgery obviously works like that, and dental flossing more relatably.
Hand hygiene only matters where you use hands. If I can do something well enough sans hands, I often will, to simplify these concerns. Thus does the list above exclude doorknobs.