A lot of new vegans struggle with adopting their newly adopted moral position that feels both obvious and unspeakable: how can others not see this? That dissonance breeds despair. You’re not just grieving animals or ecosystems; you’re grieving the moral failure of your own kind. The tribe survives on selective blindness, and you’ve lost the ability, (or willingness), to look away. You’re awake in a world that values sleep. It’s a costly form of awareness, but it’s not meaningless. The grief you carry is the proof of conscience: evidence that not everyone has gone numb.
WILL RANKIN: Becoming vegan, or even gaining true awareness… of the sheer scale of normalised animal abuse on a global scale is an eye opener, to say the least. Most of us shy away from accepting this uncomfortable reality… Inertia has a role to play. Despite all the animal toys, cutesy farmyard books and songs, eating animals is normalised from birth.
Most people’s first moral lessons – don’t hurt others, be kind, be thoughtful, etc – doesn’t extend to what’s on their plate. To undo that conditioning requires cognitive dissonance, and few people enjoy confronting the fact that their pleasure rests on suffering. They prefer to avert the gaze: a very human cowardice.
Of course, throughout human history, we have to accept that meat and dairy aren’t just ingredients; they’re rituals. Festivals, sacrifices, barbecues, holidays, Sunday roasts, grandmother’s recipes; they’re all anchors, holding us down to our identities, often striking at the heart of our belief systems. Veganism to many, can feel like cultural exile…
Until it’s a common perception that plant-based alternatives match or surpass those sensory rewards, the average person won’t switch – it’s as simple as that. Despite the fact I recently saw a clip on social media where a panel all chose a plant-based dish over its meat-based counterparts in a blind taste test, and then there’s that famous ‘sausage expert’ who chose a plant-based sausage over meat in a similar live test.
Maybe you’re one of the billions of people that gains comfort in collective guilt. “Everyone does it” dilutes responsibility. Humans cope with moral compromise by normalising it; but of course, that’s simply the same mechanism that once justified slavery, gender inequality, genocide or ecological destruction.
Do you subscribe to the myth that going plant-based is “too expensive,” “too complicated,” or “unnatural”? Often, these are simply post-rationalisations. They’re not lies exactly, more like evasions, protecting comfort from conscience…
reluctance to go vegan is rarely about reason, rather more about a feeling of resistance to self-confrontation. And that’s the same resistance that keeps people from facing any uncomfortable truth: we prefer a pleasant lie to an inconvenient truth.Humanity’s diet is less a nutritional issue than a psychological one, and it’s an ongoing tragedy of moral procrastination served three times a day.
BUT. Here’s the truth. Let’s drop the philosophical niceties: most people simply don’t care enough to even consider the plight of billions of animals… They know, at least roughly, what’s really happening: the cruelty of factory farming, the collapse of ecosystems, the rising temperatures. But knowledge without care is inert.
We human animals are masters of emotional triage. We care most about what’s near, visible and personally threatening… So denial isn’t always literal disbelief. It’s a refusal to integrate the truth emotionally… And deep empathy isn’t socially convenient. Modern life seems to reward numbness, not feeling. The more attuned you are to nonhuman suffering, the more alien you become to human indifference…
New vegans, a lot of them, struggle with adopting their newly adopted moral position that feels both obvious and unspeakable: how can others not see this? That dissonance breeds despair. You’re not just grieving animals or ecosystems; you’re grieving the moral failure of your own kind…
People bond over pleasure, ritual, and reassurance. You bond over reality. That’s a harder, lonelier glue. The tribe’s emotional currency is distraction; yours is truth. No wonder the exchange rate is poor.
But there’s a hard counterpoint. Isolation can become its own kind of pride, something akin to a moral identity built on rejection. Be careful not to confuse clarity with superiority. The point of seeing clearly isn’t to stand apart forever; it’s to live as honestly as possible within a broken species. You can’t fix the whole thing, but you can refuse to add to its noise. That’s integrity — not belonging, but truth.
The tribe survives on selective blindness, and you’ve lost the ability, (or willingness), to look away. You’re awake in a world that values sleep. It’s a costly form of awareness, but it’s not meaningless. The grief you carry is the proof of conscience: evidence that not everyone has gone numb. SOURCE…
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