What actually caused me to go Vegan?
I first went vegan in February 2023 as of writing this, so, while admittedly it hasn't been very long, it's quite a long story. I think the idea of going vegetarian was initially planted in my mind while I was in the seventh grade (I graduated from high school in 2022 for context.)
That first seed was planted by an old friend of mine, who I don't speak with anymore. She had just gone on her first hunting trip with her stepdad and managed to kill a buck. Now, hunting is a huge thing in my family as well, so at the time I never really thought much of it, even thinking she was kinda cool for going hunting. But then she sent me the picture of this deer's corpse. Now, I'll try not to be super graphic in my description, but imagine a buck laying flat on the ground with all of his guts spilling out into the snow. She was proud of herself, so she continued sending people this picture. I had a hard time telling her that it made me uncomfortable. I know she used to joke about this corpse a lot; it became like a reaction picture for her to use. I recall another one of our friends getting pissed when she would send it, and she would continue to do so anyway. We were in middle school, so of course, boundaries didn't exist.
I remember the specific feeling I would have in my stomach seeing this image. It's as if my guts were falling out as well. I wasn't used to seeing gore, violent imagery, all I knew is that it made me uncomfortable. I think at one point the thought had hit, "How could someone actually want to kill such a beautiful animal?", but just as soon as that thought arrived, it went away.
But this wouldn't be the last time an instance of this happened. As I had mentioned, my family consists of people who hunt as well. I can't remember how old I was at this point, but we were going up to my aunt's for Thanksgiving. Most of the men in our family would go hunting at the crack of dawn, and would usually be back around the time we arrived. Now, I can't remember what year this was specifically - my memory sucks balls lol - but we had just pulled into their driveway, I had gotten out of the car, and there were two deer just hanging there. They were completely gutted, you could see the hole in their stomachs, and their carcasses we just, there. Hung from their legs of all things. That brought me back to the picture my old friend had sent. But this time seeing something like that in person just felt like a little too much. Of course, I never said anything about it to my family, after all, I loved how deer meat tasted. But there was still that tinge of guilt.
Now we stray a bit away from the animal corpses. At this point, I was in high school. It must've been my senior year because I can recall attending in person, whereas the last couple of years I opted for homeschooling due to issues relating to depression and anxiety. But in my senior year, I was trying to get myself out of that nihilistic place. I became a lot more intrigued by the works of Albert Camus, a French-Algerian philosopher who lived from 1913 to 1960. My introduction to him was one of his more famous essays, "The Myth of Sisyphus." This essay made me aware of Absurdism, a philosophical theory stating that the universe is both irrational and meaningless.
We as humans have a chronic urge to understand the meaning of the world, and as such, we pretend that the world makes sense. Every systematic conception of the world, from the religious to the financial to the social must avoid the fact that it cannot account for the absurdity of reality, despite it making living more comfortable. But, Camus argues that we need to tackle the incomprehensibility of life itself to live properly. To Camus, we must live consistently with the absurd. Firstly, one must live in constant revolution. One must constantly revolt against their circumstances, whilst rejecting the idea of eternal freedom. We should recognize that we are free every moment in the state of the absurd. One must live with passion for life itself. The absurd person knows the limitation of their reasoning. They know about their mortality and yet don't accept it, living authentically. Camus summarizes his philosophy in The Myth of Sisyphus, who is condemned by the god to roll a boulder uphill for eternity, only for it to fall back down each time. Camus asks us to imagine Sisyphus happy. Sisyphus has no illusion about the futility of his existence, he has no conception of a better day or the afterlife. Despite the futility of this task, he accepts the unreasonable task, giving his all. He is aware that he will never finish the task, and yet revolts against nihilism and despair. The philosophy as a whole tells us that, while nothing is sacred, it should nonetheless exist.
I was someone who faced a sort of existential nihilism for the majority of my life till that point. But Camus work's helped me realize that, while my life may be meaningless, that doesn't mean I can't spit in life's eye and tell it to suck my wiener. With this new realization, I began to think. "If everything should exist despite their meaninglessness in the grand scheme of things, why am I stealing the autonomy away from these animals just so I can eat them?" If my life is meaningless, and so is theirs, what's saying that I have any more right to steal life away from them just because I liked the taste of meat?
I kind of let that thought boil for a while. I was more curious about society and what brought us to kill these animals in the first place. Yes, they tasted good, but at the cost of their lives? There was that onset of guilt again.
I finally made my decision in late 2022, and for my New Year's Resolution, I was going to go vegetarian. I still at this point thought that veganism was unreasonable. I wasn't doing a whole lot of research in regards to what happened in the animal agriculture industries, I just knew that murder was wrong. And then I watched Earthlings.
The disgust I felt whilst watching this was, well, if you've watched the documentary you know. Up till that point, I was still viewing animals as commodities. Cows being forcefully impregnated, baby chickens being shredded alive, and animals in gas chambers. It was a lot. I wanted to tell everyone I knew how terrible these industries were, I wanted them to watch these documentaries as well and see how much these animals had truly suffered for our pleasure. Because that's all it is, it's pleasure. We like how they taste, so, therefore, they deserve to live in horrendous situations, raped, tortured, and having their throats slit while they're screaming out in pain. And yet, when I found this out, no one actually wanted to see it. They say ignorance is bliss, but it was from that point that I realized that wasn't true at all. Ignorance is intolerance, it's arrogance and it's blindness. So from that point on I had decided that I wouldn't consume animal products anymore.
People like to sum veganism up to some diet that weirdos like to push on others, but that just isn't true. Meat eaters are the ones pushing their diets onto others when they are directly supporting the murder of innocent animals who just want to live.
Yes, we all die someday, but we shouldn't be making the place worse by enslaving billions. These are living sentient beings with the capacity to feel love, fear, and pain. They just want to live. So let them live.