Hashtag Vegetarian Problems

The path I have so far taken in life has affected everything about the way I think, as I'm sure is the case with everyone. One of the huge things that changed the way I think is being a vegetarian. It changed the obvious things, like how I look at food, nutrition, vitamins, health, fitness, animals, big business, chain restaurants, etc. But it also had a butterfly affect on other things that come with being a vegetarian such as debate skills, research abilities, reading people, psychological analyses, anger levels, self-awareness, etc. 

One of the most annoying things that happens to vegetarians is that you are opened up to every person's opinion on vegetarianism and they are almost all the same, so you literally have to have the same debate hundreds of times before you just become that angry vegetarian that yells at meat eaters or you just quit altogether. I've become a pretty good example because I feel like all I do is yell at people about stuff that I'm sure they should know and I feel like I've talked to so many people about the same stuff that it must be somewhere close to 7 billion people and yet noobs (shoobies) just keep coming along!

Seriously though. Besides transforming my health in a great way, I have really learned to argue with so many types of people. My goal as a vegetarian is to help as many people as possible do the same thing. We may all be only one person but one person at a time adds up and before you know it we are raising the percent of the world who makes better choices for themselves and the environment. With learning how to argue, I had to really know what I was talking about. I was already pretty good with computers and google at a young age but I got so much better when I had so many things I needed to learn about and the power to do it at my fingertips. My job now involves research and I am the best at my company thanks to those years of learning how to back my argument. I can type fast, weed out the b-crap, and use Boolean Logic and varying word structures that help you find what you want to know rather than what the mass media is posting. For instance, when it comes to things like vegetarianism, I find it’s good to look in the scholarly articles section to verify any facts you think you know. I mean you’d think it’s pretty obvious that you won’t die without meat since there are so many vegetarians and vegans alive today, but hey having a scientist back you up and a research paper to cite is always a plus.

In this web of things I’ve learned, I learned to read people from the previously mentioned arguments. I wondered why so many people had the same questions and why they actually wanted to know the answers. Or if they didn’t want to know the answer, why did they ask? For instance, one annoying thing people like to point out is that plants have to die for my food so I should care about that too. Well if that person actually cared about something dying in order to become food, why would they eat both plants and animals? The answer is, they don’t care. They just want to mess with you and throw their hands up to say well if you have to kill something either way then I may as well do both without distinguishing between the two. I started searching for the root of most of the arguments since they almost never end in “hmm wow now that you’ve given thorough evidence against all of my reservations I’ll be vegetarian now.” It turns out, meat eaters are offended, sometimes on a subconscious level, by vegetarians. It’s an inner guilt where they feel like I am better than them because I have more self control and make better decisions so the only way to feel better is to put me down and be glad they aren’t like me. Meat eaters will search for any small thing that “bails” them out of having to consider a different way of life.  Having realized this, it helps me become less angry about people coming up with the same argument. Sometimes I even let them be “right.” I mean does it really matter? In some cases yes, in others no. Don't let people spread ignorance but they can keep it to themselves all they want. I can't wait until there's a way to hammer information into someone's head, but until then..

I think getting rid of anger was an important improvement I learned in my journey. Not so much “getting rid” of an emotion but learning to control emotions has helped so much. I came to the realization that being mad at someone isn’t going to do anything to them. It won’t do anything in fact except make you sit around wasting a negative emotion on your surroundings and possibly negatively affecting the people in your vicinity. Being sad was my main emotion since I was always a sensitive kid. I realized that, same as anger, being sad doesn’t actually do anything, crying does help since it releases some built up tension or emotion, but just moping around is a waste of life! I slowly and then quickly realized that every emotion except happiness and everything related to being happy is totally worthless. Why not wake up and be positive? It’s not to say that being optimistic will make you right, but being negative won’t make you right either so why not pick the emotion that makes you happier? So rather than saying ughhh I’m totally going to do bad on the test tomorrow, ughhh I’m probably going to forget that formula, ughhh there’s not enough time to read and do HW?! Why not be positive, study as hard as possible and internalize some constructive criticism that you can apply to next time? If there’s nothing you can do to change it, you have to embrace it. I can’t even imagine how much time I wasted complaining about how hard something was, what grade I would need to get in order to get an A in the class, how mean the teacher was, etc. Did any of that get me a better grade? No it got me less study time. I think this is a logical issue that people don’t get, perhaps because of emotions getting into the way.. A good quote to summarize this goes something like, resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.

A related topic is getting rid of worry. Worrying about bills won't get your bills paid. Also, worrying about death is useless. It is definitely important to do your part in preventing death, eat right, exercise, stay out of dangerous situations and always be as safe as you can. Worrying about death is another thing. Do people really think worrying about the end of the world is going to stop it from happening? Doubtfully, they are just wasting life and emotions on a pointless topic. If an asteroid were going to hit the earth, it would take about a second between the time you first see it and the time impact occurs. So that is only a second that you might have to know that the world is going to end, and then it's over. There is nothing you can do about that. You will just have to wait and see what happens after life, if anything at all. I guess hope you don't turn into a dairy cow!

Last but not least, and most importantly in fact, is self-awareness. At a semi-young age I had a moment where a person walked by me and I realized they had a life and a family and their own thoughts and worries that were totally void of me, I realized I’m not the star of the show, the center of the universe, I am pretty much not important at all (except to me).  With my new found ability to evaluate the motivations of the people around me, I noticed that a lot of adults did not have this sense of awareness about the fact that you and your problems are not shared by everyone or anyone for that matter. A lot of young people turned out to be that way also. I wondered at first, is it something that happens in time or for some people does it never happen? Does it happen to some people and then they forget when they get older? Were all the stupid adults smart kids at some point and there’s no hope for us? I do have a theory that alcohol plays an important role in getting rid of certain important things we've learned but that's another topic. I can’t tell anyone the answer since I didn’t know those adults when they were kids and since I’ve been paying attention I have seen few young people make the transition, most I have seen are much later than I had and at a slower pace. My point being, I think it was sped along by the fact that I was constantly thinking about the plight of another, another species, but still not myself. Then it was only a matter of time before I started realizing that everyone needs help and I’m a lucky b. I don’t waste food because I think of all the people who don’t have that luxury and it makes me so sad to see people waste meat since it’s a life they’re throwing away like it means nothing. I think it's silly to be "grateful" for menial things when you should be grateful to have been born where you were so that you have the privilege to be free, and to have all your basic needs met. Even homeless people in the US have it good compared to some people in other countries. You don't walk down the streets of most places and have to worry about whether you'll be kidnapped and sold into slavery or gang raped, yea be grateful for that. The best analogy I came up with to get across how I feel is my alien example. If an alien race took over the Earth, we would probably be ants to them, maybe cows or dogs, who knows. The point is, we would be primitive animals that don’t speak the same language. Well let’s say that race now decides humans taste good and they decide to start harvesting us for food. In this scenario you can apply anything that humans do to animals and figure out how you’d feel about it and how you can expect the animals feel about it. For instance, when it comes to factory farming, and the stupid argument that is “we need to eat cows or else they’d go extinct,” would you rather live your life as you live it now and then one day an alien comes to your door and kills you and eats you? (hunting), would you rather live in an institution where you are treated nicely, given food and water and freedom for the most part, then one day you get killed and eaten? (family farming) or would you rather live in a holocaust like concentration camp with no personal space, no sun, minimum amount of low quality food and water and live in misery until the day that you and everyone else around you is slaughtered and eaten? (factory farming). That’s obviously rhetorical..  If this was the fate of the human race, would you rather we all continued living like this forever or would it be better to go extinct? Another question from this same topic, if your friend was killed and turned into food and then the alien didn’t like how your friend tasted so they threw him away, how would that feel? Like a wasted life? Or probably if your one of those denial type people you’d say it’s better since you don’t want your friend to get eaten but come on, let’s be real, at least if you could serve the purpose you were killed for and not be killed for the landfill that would be better right? Anyway, putting myself in other peoples shoes is what I got good at and now I am much more aware about how I act, what I do, what others do, etc. and I think it’s a happier life or at least healthier mentally and physically.

I think it's important to remember all of these lessons, where they came from, how they developed because it helps spawn new things and also you can apply it to new things you learn. My dad always said he felt his best parenting came from remembering his childhood. Rather than coming up with what kids should do as it's convenient for parents, he would think from both angles and then make a decision. Hopefully this blog will help me do that.