I've got the social justice autism... and the wall of text autism.

When I started college I was probably a left-leaning Democrat but halfway through, because of my econ, marketing, polysci, etc classes, I basically left a full blown socialist. I'm the boomer chud meme.

Over time I started to understand what my worldview was. As it came more into focus, the pandemic hit, and the BLM protests happened and I got active. Not like super active praxis 24/7 but I was at marches and and demonstrations when I could be. I even did a sit-in during college for a protest for a law that was passed that let cops take homeless people's belonging if they were charged with "camping" in parks and other public places.

During the pandemic, I was a paying "at large" member of the DSA and a local chapter was started, I was contacted to join, and did. We did some activism for woman's rights, handing out literature, etc. but we weren't super active and lacked dircection. Towards the end, a newer person joined and took over after a president moved away. They tried to rekindle it but it was basically dead. Another activist did use us as a vessel to bring more awareness to the issues the homeless in our area faced but they left because we live in a hyper conservative area and they wanted to live somewhere that was more friendly to trans and queer people.

So the DSA fizzled out but during all of that I sort of started reading a bunch of theory. I knew I was a lefty but felt I needed to get more educated. I read Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and some Anarchy theory(Maletesta, Gelderloos, etc). So I guess that sets the foundation I'm floating somewhere between ML and anarchism right now. Among other things, veganism, vegetarianism, plant-based diets, and other diets that are better for the environment came on my radar. (I know vegetarianism isn't environmental harm reduction but I'm getting there. At the time I was naive.)

I was gifted with the gout in my early 30s because I spend my 20s eating a bunch of red meat and drinking. Fall of 2022 I had the worst flair up of my life. I was practically unable to walk for 3 weeks. I finally decided I was gonna try vegetarianism. By spring of next year, I gave up eggs and dairy and went full vegan. Here's why:

I'm allegedly a software developer, although my work history suggests I"m actually a bum. But back in 2022 I finally got a programming job after trying for 6 years. The job was writing feed automation software for feedyards and dairies. I got a crash course on just how fucking awful the industry is. Like not front row seat, but a few rows back. I learned that vegetarianism is not any less horrible. I learned that a dairy cow's life is about 4 years, and they are forced pregnant every year. After they dry up, they are turned into food. The dairy industry is just as bad, if not worse, than the beef industry. I've seen parlors get washed out in the Texas panhandle where we are facing an eminent drinking water crisis. How much water is wasted is one thing I don't see get brought up enough, the PTSD of workers in the industry is another. Bonus points for the vitamin D myth when people tell you supplementing is not the way to go because, well whole milk with vitamin D is supplemented with vitamin D. It comes in big plastic jugs like fryer grease and it's dumped onto their feed.

I went full vegan in the spring of 2023.

It was weird still working in the industry while becoming a vegan and I was definitely aware of the hypocrisy but I was getting paid well for the first time in my life and I sort of would just disassociate while I was at work to get by. I was fired summer of last year and have been trying to find something that is a bit more friendly to animals since, but I'd actually like my freelance web dev thing to get off the ground. Shameless plug but I am trying to carve a niche for lefty and alt spaces because I really don't wanna make websites for chuds lol.

I've sort of been figuring it out since but have been surviving on a lot of vegan junk food and accidental vegan stuff but I am looking into going towards whole food/back to Mediterranean.

My partner watched some earthling ed videos and wanted to make the switch. I think for me the major point that broke my personal dissonance was looking at my children and realizing that mammals lactate for their young. That made the cruelty of our food system very clear to me, and removed any doubts that i had with making the change myself.

It's pretty cliche but I got the bus home and on the way we passed an animal farm. There were chickens in the outdoor pen and it just clicked in my mind that what I was eating were living creatures that could feel pain and emotions. Instead of going straight home I jumped off at the closest store and began to look into buying plant based meat alternatives. I finished my shop, went home, and immediately threw out all the meat products I still had. I was only vegetarian for about 6 months but then I went vegan and never looked back.

Nowadays I am WFPB and doing a lot better.

Kind of a silly one, but for me it was some reddit meme thread. It was a joke about arch linux, and a person jokes "if somebody uses arch and is vegan, which will they say first?" and then somebody mentioned that "I'm vegan btw" is a common joke on r/vegancirclejerk. I went to that subreddit and started reading, it was hilarious, but I also felt my cognitive dissonance grow with every post. Took me like a week or two and I decided that I am a fucking hypocrite and need to make a change, because what I am participating in is seriously wrong and I can't continue like this.

I asked my partner if she would be cool if we tried out veganism, and turns out she has also been thinking about it lately, due to a vegan coworker that inspired her. So we then went vegan at the same time and it's been almost 4 years of that now.

Also similarly to hamid, all the vegan marketing felt super off to us which made us do the additional plunge into WFPB with none of the weird substitutes.

I went vegetarian because my partner was one. When I moved into their apartment it felt weird to start cooking meat in her place considering thinking about how meat was created made her cry. We didn't really understand the full weight of what dairy, eggs and other animal products entailed at the time.

To be honest, the real trigger for me was my health. I was about 35 kg more than I weight now and was diagnosed with pre-diabetes. At the time I was giving my cat insulin and saw what my own future looked like. I remember googling "What can I do to prevent getting diabetes" and I found Dr. Greger's website Nutrition Facts and Dr. Bernard's PCRM. I'm so glad I found it too, since I was already vegetarian eating only meat really didn't make sense to me, keto just felt like bullshit but the explanations found on the vegan sites aligned with what I knew about biology and chemistry. I looked at the actual statistics too, vegans were clearly in a lower risk category across the board for metabolic disorders like heart disease and diabetes. I decided to make the plunge to a whole foods plant based diet but still didn't really call myself vegan because of stereotypes and propaganda convincing me that actual vegans were crazy.

Once the meat and animal product goggles were off though I started seeing animal exploitation for what it was. A structural oppression of living and thinking beings for no reason. It caused a cognitive dissonance in me whenever I started to notice it and when discussing it with my partner we decided to become not only plant-based but vegan in the animal rights sense as well. Something was still not right though as I looked through reddit's vegan community and saw a lot of nonsense and businesses advertising questionable products. It wasn't until I found the vegan circlejerk did it really start to click. I joined the discord and met potato who at the time was the top mod but also the first vegan I met who really cared and was understanding of me and other people who would join this chat room. Unfortunately due to the dynamics of online communities it fractured several times and they eventually moved on but in that time I became one of the most active mods of the subreddit. Running the subreddit was a mixed bag, I was exposed to a lot of stuff I would have preferred not to be but also literally dozens of people would reach out to me directly telling me these stupid memes really affected them and made them change their lives to become vegan and that meant a lot of me. As for potato, I still keep in touch with them and consider potato one of my friends to this day 7 years later. In this time my commitment to the animals has only grown, I was able to make the case to one of my best friends who made the plunge and have regained my health in the process looking and feeling better in my 40s than at any other part of my life.

As reddit changed and my job got more intense I stepped back from moderating the subreddit but later decided to try and host this lemmy server and now this is where we all are.

It's petty corny, but in 2014 my life was going pretty well job wise and partner wise. And I was vegetarian for over a decade. I just felt that I owed it to upgrade to veganism.

Since then, I've done the undercover slaughterhouse video footage thing. Once you see it, you can never go back.

Lol my answer is directly related to my answer to last weeks questions

I guess cutting out meat was: I was chilling with some animals and I was like, why the fuck would I eat a living creature??? That's deranged???

And then I got bullied IRL by vegans and realized I was turning a blind eye to violence I didn't see directly. The cognitive dissonance lifted. Not commodifying/enslaving animals came with that. I didn't really think about how this "food" came to be and once I let myself understand I simply could not do it anymore.

A long journey for me. I worked on the school farm as a kid, I remember the first time animal ag hit me we had raised broiler (meat) hens and I was loading them onto the murder van. I was quite young, it seemed wrong in a vague nonspecific way. I knew dairy was completely fucked by the end of highschool and went ovo-pesca.

Many years later in my twenties I had just read a book in which studies of zebra fish modifying their behaviour towards pessimism when their lips were envenomed with bee venom. Harmless, but painful. Such a change only made sense to me if they had something akin to what in us we call emotions. I had recently moved away from living in a poly house, partly because of my deeply conflicted feelings on their enthusiastic rejection of any form of pesca/vege-tarianism and was doing a lot of soul searching.

I found vegan circlejerk and thought it was hilarious, and the combo made me be like "fair cop, at worst you miss out on some fish, at best you avoid horrificly depraved acts" so I approached my wife and said "I think veganism is morally correct" and she said yep and that was that.

in other news stability testing for mica pigments commences today. Hoping to make some pretty rheoscopic fluid for kaleroscopes for the nibblings.

I think it is worth posting to the community here. I consider this server a real community and I'm here to help as much as I can. I believe in mutual aid.

Things may or may not get bad fast in the US. If you are in the US and you need help getting out or forming a plan just in case let me know and we can figure something out. Anything from helping get a passport to helping fund a ticket out when things get bad.

It took me too long.

I was raised in a household where my parents did not cook meat at home, yet no one was vegetarian. When I was 10 I decided to become an (ovo-lacto) vegetarian for the environment. I remember understanding (as a vegetarian) that it was dumb to be against eating dogs if you ate other animals, but instead of thinking it wasn't okay to eat any, I took the position that it was okay to eat dogs. (I was vegetarian very specifically not because I cared about the animals, because that's not what men do...).

Around 18, I felt like it wasn't "worth depriving myself of taste pleasure" and started to eat animals. Six months on, I was studying with a (carnist) friend of a friend, when he asked me what I thought of bestiality. I had an immediate reaction against it, followed quickly by the realization that it wasn't consistent to be against it and also be fine with eating animals. Despite full well knowing that dairy was wrong, I still only became a vegetarian again, feeling guilty occasionally while eating dairy and egg products.

It took watching the movie "Chicken Run", reading a book on eco-socialism, and the boredom associated with a 15-hour plane ride one week an entire year after the above to get me to finally understand what I was being a part of, and I decided to become a vegan.

I wanted to be supportive of my SO and when we started renting a new place i agreed that it would be meat-free (she was Vegetarian at the time). Within a few months she wanted to become vegan after 20 years Vegetarian. I said no problem and we made our house vegan. When we went out to eat i just ate vegan with her and after 7 months or so i realized i had been vegan so i might as well just commit to it.

So yeah, kind of silly. I do take issue with the meat* industry and all that but what made me decide was basically just "that wasn't so hard" and i just kept doing it. That was about 7 years ago? Crazy.

i'm sure my story's not that interesting, but that's never stopped me before!

i had a friend go vegan in high school, probably 2002 or 2003; i thought she was nuts. we lived in Iowa which is hardcore meat and potatoes territory. but this was my first real-life exposure to that ideology. Alice, if you're out there, i hope you're still vegan and know that while i was not cool about it then, it affected me!

anyway, fast forward many, many years of loving animals but never thinking about where food came from. i ate the standard American diet, drank too much, lived a sedentary life; by the time i sort of "came to" i was over 400lbs (180+kg), a pack-a-day smoker, a heavy drinker, etc. shortly after i realized what i was doing to myself i got diagnosed with diabetes and moved to Colorado. the more active lifestyle out here combined with some other choices helped me get a bit healthier, stop smoking, and some other things. i think this was the first time i tried going vegan myself, maybe 2011 or 2012. it was really difficult and my complicated relationship with food made it not work.

around this same time i began practicing Zen Buddhism, which i continue doing to this day. i tried going vegan several times over the years and never lasted longer than about six months - the Buddhism strongly encouraged the vegetarian/vegan lifestyle, but it still didn't click.

in 2022 my wife and i bought a house and got two cats. they are an absolute joy in my life, and it was that which made me realize ever buffalo wing or hamburger i ate came from a creature with as rich an internal life and as much feeling and personality as my boys, and i couldn't do it any more. in 2023 i became a vegetarian, and in 2024 (April-ish) i became a vegan and have stuck it out since then. the kitties, the zen, and the internet have all helped.

additionally, going vegan made tremendous positive impacts on my health. for the first time in my life my diabetes is under control, my depression is moderated, my gout isn't flaring up, and i'm almost 100lbs lighter than i was when i started all this stuff.

so... yeah! tofu is amazing.