Is Veganism Really That Hard?

[Peppesq]

My ethical system compels me to take animal suffering extremely seriously.

Because of that, I can’t help seeing what the factory farming industry does to animals as a holocaust. I’m a Jew who lost family members in concentration camps. so I don’t say that lightly. I believe what we do to animals is a monstrous act, on par with the worst evils our species has ever committed.

Which means that, when someone goes to the grocery store to buy a steak, what they’re doing—according to my ethics—is the equivalent of going to a concentration camp to buy a paperweight with ashes of Jews in it, giving money to the concentration camp which will help keep it in operation.

Okay, I almost never write or say anything like what I’ve written above. I am not an activist. I don’t lecture. I don’t judge people. And by “I don’t judge,” I mean both that I don’t make comments about what people eat and that I don’t judge them privately in my mind. If I’m sitting next to you while you’re eating a hamburger, and I’m thinking about it at all (I never think much about what people eat), I’m probably hoping you enjoy it. I remember eating hamburgers. They were delicious!

Maybe, given the first three paragraphs of this post, that sounds irrational or dishonest, but it’s true. I’m simply not judgmental by nature.

But lots of meat eaters are smart people. They have thought about all of this. They understand vegan ethics. They know why I’m a vegan and what I believe, and they know that—if I was a judgmental person—I’d be forced to judge them.

And that feels rotten. It feels like shit to know your friend believes you’re essentially on par with the Nazis or people who support them. If they “know” I feel this way, they’re wrong. I don’t. My judgment-module is too broken to have such feelings. But they’re not stupid for assuming I do. My guess is many people reading this are thinking “given your views, how can you not judge them?” So of course some of my friends think that, too.

And they have been judged in this way by some other vegans. They’ve been lectured. They’ve been chastised. They’ve been called names. It doesn’t matter if someone knows a hundred vegans and only three have been nasty to them. The human mind is an over-zealous pattern-matching machine. We notice the three who are nasty. The 97 who aren’t don’t make much of an impression.

So, yes, it is hard to feel sympathy for someone you think (rightly or wrongly) is harshly judging you.

[FredVegrox]

It is only an excuse to say going vegan is hard. Awareness of why to be vegan was enough for me, and I knew excuses would not be good enough. Those who will not turn to being vegan when they know why to be are those people who are lazy about making meaningful changes.

[EyesPi]

A lot of people suffer from difficulty digesting plants and then want to go back to animal products. When I try to get people to go vegan, I also try to explain how much digestive enzyme supplements help when you don't eat a highly thought out and strict, enzyme rich diet. I recommend getting a zenwise digestive enzyme from Amazon. They work the fastest and best. I tried one from a vitamin shoppe and it didn't work nearly as well.

These enzymes will help your body rejuvinate(not get burnt out) by turning food into more usable energy and this energy conversion rate plays a big role in appetite regulation and neurotransmitter health = more vegans.