Being vegan: suicide, misery & isolation.

it's really easy to throw around a word
like compassion as if it's an entirely good thing but um you know well what if compassion leads you to have complete contempt for your roommates and you know in this case our roommates are parents raising kids you know she's sketched out for you a complex situation you know what if compassion makes you want to vomit every time you smell cooking meat coming from the kitchen that's your bedroom or fills you with rage and contempt for the people you're living with and the excuses they're making and teaching their kids that it's okay to eat meat and drink milk and so on you know I mean compassion can compassion can lead to your your ruin it can lead to a downward spiral of depressive and suicidal feelings as much as anything else can I banish yen a lot of things but that vegan lifestyle you don't know whether to laugh or to cry and in the old days on this channel I used to have a lot of videos basically subtitled like the struggle is real writing a lot of comments in England you know the struggle is real ashlee life as a vegan was really hard and soulful and and awful and that was such a contrast to the propaganda that was in fashion at the time for vegans you know sometimes you laugh about it as long as you cry about it yeah I had this I cross swords recently with these idiots who are attached to a I use channel AI us atheism is unstoppable and one of the things they were saying that I disagreed with you kind of have overheard this you were busy doing more meaningful things but they were claiming that like the thing they hated about vegans was that these vegans live their whole lives only surrounded by only talking to other vegans like they didn't mix with meat-eaters or not we're not vegan I said to them look look just just think through what you're saying you know this can't possibly true almost all vegans your parents eat meat your whole all the friends you had in high school or college eat meat your co-workers eat meat I mean I said it's just not true like even if you wanted to live only certain of other vegans you live your whole life constantly in the company of meteors often in much closer company then you can stand to bear so that brings me to this this comment this is a comment on reddit and you're gonna see it's it's as real as a guess I'm an ethical vegan living with non vegan roommates and I have to leave for hours every time okay so it's a female author should I'm an ethical vegan living with non vegan roommates and I have to leave for hours every time they cook something the flesh and secretions of tortured animals the smell stresses me out badly enough and is unbearable think Jews having to smell the burning flesh of their family members but replace it with someone who cares about animals being forced to smell their flesh and secretions cooking but the kitchen is always filthy and the contamination makes this so yeah makes it so I'm unable to cook any real meals yeah you think reading voiceovers isn't a real job and you do this now you realize it's a real job it's a real profession gonna get it through buzzer yeah yeah then my roommates have to start I've started complaining that they feel that they can't always cook what they want because sometimes they actually show some decency and think to themselves but that will bother I'm forced to kiss their asses because I don't want to cause conflict with their kids around which will only backfire and force them to justify abusing animals their kids I'm also a full-time student on top of working for them and don't have time to be leaving for hours on top of being too stressed out to focus on studying after I get back so this this is only 0.1 in the list you might post the number one at the start okay and these are basically reasons why being vegan is destroying her life and she's miserable and and she wants to kill herself I mean she's desperately desperately unhappy yeah this is the car so as a vegan sorry you know you've never been in this kind of situation you went vegan after you finished caught wolf yeah right right so you were living with another vegan because he didn't have a choice naturally you know you you you guys are sharing a room together but you can imagine in college you used to share a room sure an apartment yes with four other girls there's mine for it yeah they're always and their boyfriends like seven at one time right so it's seven people sharing a kitchen kind of thing and you can imagine it really would have been awful trying to be vegan in the contest yeah and there are other issues here like the smell and the psychology you know I think some vegans would stop short of saying this is like smelling their family members being burned in the Holocaust yeah just thinking of the logistics to having to share well I'm having it too they're cutting boards with yes yeah but I just said I respect it I mean I understand why she says that way and so on yeah so we continue point two okay my room is right next to the kitchen and I'm always hearing bangs and the mom yelling at her kids and I have Piper kusas to top it off so that on top of the smells and contamination because they have kids and aren't clean people themselves makes it borderline torture Olivia they could use some some commas you know what you're miserable into present zone so so so hyper cause I've actually never heard of it so extremely acute hearing when I was younger that was a that was broke I never had a diagnosis rental yeah so I just mentioned part of the context for this the reason why I found this coming I think I knew this woman fully five years ago I now knew her via the internet but you know we chatted through something like Skype and you know that we had some email back and forth so some what I believe I knew I could be wrong but I saw this comment on reddit I was like you were you know so with someone were actually I think I know the surrounding situation now that doesn't really matter I'm presenting on this video partly because this is something all of us can relate to yeah and it's something that I think exactly unsympathetic meat eaters like those people I was debating with the people from the a IU subculture though these people it might be under debated me over discord online yeah they might not think about it right I don't think right they profoundly lack sympathy for because of it even you know what cuz it's probably what's just shown in you know what peers show that they live this lifestyle where everybody makes smoothies it is but it's also the moral superiority moral inferiority thing the last time I bought you vegan ice cream bars I bought you coconut milk ice cream bars the woman who seemed like a woman at the very low level education at the checkout line she was an older woman I would guess she was 60 but she just seemed like someone who never went past even primary school frankly talking and she said to me you know very simply she was like oh you know I've never tried these before and they were like $2 offs they were like you know five dollars Canadian you know and my she said you know and she said in a kind of garbled way she was wondering if they were any good and you know the first thing I said was well I'm vegan said so you know I hate this kind of stuff all the time and and she was a little bit confused by that and she said yes yes I understand you know you're much better than all of us but what I wonder is if they taste and you know she really didn't mean it in a mean way but you don't put to her my answer that I'm vegan is irrelevant you know I mean she wants to know if the ice cream fart it's good it's like yeah it's a vegan product so I'm I'm saying I'm vegan you know I mean but that's you know I thought oh so you work in a grocery store and and that's your reaction to vegan to you vegan means morally superior and I think these people said mean if you guys don't know it was it was kind of it was famous on the internet for like three days you're like oh wow aisel talk to Amy Kay and these people from a IU server and he really handed them it was it was pretty vicious it was a brutal side of my character literally never seen before you've never seen me really lay into somebody psychologically but it was it was a kind of you know demolition yeah I mean psychological America so psychologically and and mostly ethically but it was most people wasn't it was a whole room of people it was me against like four or five people but it really what it was it really was about ethics it was really saying know people who don't you know hold ourselves to any standard and so on but it was a really really strange kind of internet confrontation and there are people who do that for a living they're full-time drama queens on YouTube so I think they can take it and I've chatted with them since then they're you know okay but from their perspective they see vegans as morally superior and again that's why that started my conversation with them started with them approaching vegans for only living amongst other vegans and it's like that's what do you saying look that's not true for any of us yeah or or it's only true for exactly people like us that's true if you're in a couple linger yeah I actually see Facebook posts on groups that I'm a member of looking for vegan roommates because yes right right well also but it mean in reality you and I are just kind of cut off a little bit for us too so ya know keep me on the wheel vegan and we don't drink alcohol yeah and we don't watch ice hockey we don't watch football yeah you know I mean but you know there are many things cutting us off from the mainstream yeah there was for about two months but would be exactly this kind of technology you know when the 20% of this computer and the internet and so on it makes it easier than ever to live in isolation yeah you know my grandparents they people used to meet up and play cards they used to meet up and play you know cribbage or they'd go and play different types of sports that don't require you to be an athlete like um so what's wrong with the giant heavy rock on the ice curling curling yeah see I'm barely Canadian I don't know there's no camera Canadian sports you know they do curling you know well in the 1920s no in the 1920s in 1930 yeah no exactly people now play people now play xbox they now all we know they can't do curling but yeah but my point is those things bled to some level of social interaction so I do think it's true the vegans who only spend their time with other vegans are the people who like this you know really yes been on the telly and that was true in China also it's not like I had a ton of friends in China you know we really lived a life you know to yourself right that's right but also again it's not like people were beating down our door to be friends those in China alcohol was a big big barrier well no if I if I ate meat and drank alcohol I really could have made friends in China a lot of people when I first got there they were giving me advice on that but for them their idea of socializing especially that was entirely built on getting drunk eating meat and sleeping with prostitutes or equivalent is also part of it as though that's the real China that's the sort of China you don't see on fashion television let's go no.3 I can't find a vegan roommate and can't afford living on my own for H yeah yeah yeah ok number 4 I have PTSD from being physically abused nearly daily for a decade of my life and I'm dealing with that on top of it heavy oh okay keeps going I assume because they were getting shorter and shorter that this was no whining down no it's just getting started alright number five someone I used to love who is abusive has recently come back into my life and when he isn't asking for nudes he's treating me like [ __ ] I even ended up telling him I wanted to kill myself after he made a joke about not giving a [ __ ] about veganism in other words animals being tortured I was desperate for him to understand how much pain it caused me but he just insulted me for it and made me feel worse I was only able to get him to promise to try to be nice to me and not mock animals being abused through nudes basically oh because that's ah through nudes ie because he wants nude photographs and you see it's yeah grammatically and today it's leaving a little bit up to your imagination so he was a she was able to make him stop through nudes he's gonna mean carrot-and-stick yeah tell me about it because that's how desperate I am apparently and tonight I told him I was in pain and he acted like he didn't care and it was burden to him again yeah so you know anyone watching this you just drop that bomb anyone who's watching sorry for themselves never late yeah so I if this is the same girl I knew five years ago I remember her then talking about this same guy and already there were these red flags with them like demanding nudes and stuff and like I didn't know her that well I wasn't gonna be like lucky [ __ ] getting yourself these are really serious red flags but I remember it was like wow these are really serious red flags this is this kind of behavior yes I remember that five years ago this already happened as someone I only you know I haven't talked to you for four five years made if it's a totally different person then then you know you know maybe I'm I'm assuming but anyway there are two people who have a lot of these things ago all right point six okay I have no actual friends and no one to relate to so I'm essentially forced to continue talking to number five the only people I've talked to regularly regularly have just heard me so I mean I know you know the content of my channel has changed we now have 20% more content about Aristotle and Socrates that nobody wants to hear and maybe 80% less content about being a self-pitying isolated vegan that was part of the original mo my gentleman you remember the old videos I really talked about isolation isolation from your own family isolation from your culture isolation from the few friends you might have this was this was grist for the mill here on a Bellis Hill and I think I mean again there's nothing ineluctable about it there's nothing essential about veganism that leaves these things but you can see how you know extrinsically and and you know accidentally these things tend to go together mmm and that's probably if it is the same person that's probably why she became four instantly briefly five years ago was exactly looking for the vegans on the internet looking people who cared about these issues looking for somebody yeah yeah I don't know before I was speaking I didn't have very many friends anyway yeah well you know you suck at life [Laughter] right right but I mean what's what's the point of having friends you know you know there's there is more than one point but for me ultimately if you care about activism you care about politics you know politics is a social enterprise you care about learning languages we're talking with us a couple hours ago learning any language you want to learn Cree you want to learn a jib why you want to learn Chinese really you know communication of you ideally face-to-face I still write email in Chinese you know is a huge brother so a lot of the things that interest me in life make me value friendship for much more than just what friendship commonly connotes in our in our culture okay number seven okay number seven the only people in my life are telling me to go to there it's so easy to say isn't it but therapy couldn't change really give me a place to live and I wouldn't be able to trust the therapist unless they were an ethical vegan so would only cause me to be more stressed out beneath any facade right so this is a real issue we've talked about this in a bunch of different contexts people say get professional what if there is no professional help what if the professional you can get the therapist fundamentally has no sympathy with you because they regard veganism as crazy or they regard the things that are that are real sources of stress and misery in your life as unreasonable or crazy you know you want someone can relate to that like for me you know so you know I went to a therapist with my ex-wife before we split up you know where we went together I guess you'd call it couples therapy or whatever but like yeah but I mean like having a therapist who can relate to intellectually or professionally what was going in either our lives is you know it's kind of asking a lot and then beyond that I mean what is what is the function what help can the therapist give you like at her case the therapist can't give you a better place to live you know they can't actually change any of the real problems they can they can help you rehearse talking about those problems so you become more I look when to discussing them you know but yes and anyway it's not just about like you okay so you're right you're right abusive guy okay yeah it sounds pretty abusive asking for nudes and having these weird transactions between she's she's got a relationship she wants to get out of but it is also the only relationship she has no life which is you know which is very sad but that's you know let's keep another real if she if she loses this one guy who wants nude photos or where all the time it's just not necessarily evil but it sounds awful in this case then she's gonna be she's gonna be all alone hmm okay okay Wow yep all right so she says I want to die so [ __ ] bad and literally the only thing that's kept me alive for seven years has been my responsibility to try to help the animals but I feel like I can't even get to the point to significantly help animals because the process of getting into a position where I can takes too long and the weight is unbearable painful I was on anxiety medication in the past but got off of it and moved in with this family and I thought I wouldn't need it since I wasn't being abused anymore also because it made me gain weight now I need something because I don't think anxiety make it medication is the answer I can't move to another city with more vegans because I'm a full-time student and won't have to wait for the semester end but I can't live like this anymore yep and then after that kind of radio silence yeah so again I don't know if this is the particular person I knew but whether or not it's a complete stranger you know my my heart goes out there and you know I don't know all of us are in situations that are only degrees of difference separated from that I think all of us can imagine being trapped in those circumstances or we've been in circumstances you know somewhere along those lines and anyway I'm very cagey about this because of the legacy of Buddhism also it's it's really easy to throw around a word like compassion as if it's an entirely good thing and you know you know my catch phrase I talk about compassion being an analytical tool and so on you know but um you know well what if compassion leads you to have complete contempt for your roommates and you know in this case her roommates are parents raising kids you know she's sketched out for you a complex situation you know what if compassion makes you want to vomit every time you smell cooking meat coming from the kitchen like your bedroom or fills you with rage and contempt for the people you're living with and the excuses they're making and teaching their kids that it's okay to eat meat and drink milk and so on you know I mean compassion can compassion can lead to your your ruin they can lead to a downward spiral of depressive and suicidal feelings as much as anything else can you know maybe maybe more than most you know so to put this into into context what I was going to compare it to there's a YouTube channel called so you're dating a vegan this is girlfriend still not vegan she annoys me she's not funny clever or pretty to tolerate her animal murder leave that ignorant girl if she has not changed by now that's me well that's my wife you're talking about there yeah you remember those guys yeah and they got a lot of flack from their viewers lately because they they were dating and they got married I assumed they got married after the start the YouTube channel I never checked and she the woman in the couple she still never you know converted to veganism yeah and you know so they get messages from people and their audience saying look you know you should drop that bomb you should you should you should break up with her if she's not vegan yet and again I mean on the one hand maybe as vegans you know people can relate to that but on the other hand I mean it's it's a lonely road I think a lot of people want to cling to the only person that got who loves them or cares about them in their life even if they're deeply flawed even if they're demanding nude photos all the time or you know whatever the situation is despite the terrible things that are wrong with them because you know nobody is quite so alone as a as a lonely vegan you know in this in this one you think it was like two people owned but you uh you can't even pick up a chocolate bar at 7-eleven at yourself up for something as a vegan I mean I know I know it's a more time with shallow but it's real the feeling of persecution and the feeling of having closed doors all around you the feeling of being in a culture that's essentially an inherently evil it's based on the exploitation of animals and ecologically unsustainable things the feeling that you know all the people around you are fundamentally immoral and unethical you can sell all that as as compassion the compassionate lifestyle but you know the dude on so you're dating a vegan out of other names he's red hair doesn't he and with a red hair dude he he asked his wife at one point would you consider becoming vegan in exchange if I take up rock climbing I'll become all rock oh man if you become vegan he'll come to the gym every time that you go to the gym no not every time y'all come to the gym No I can't make you do a hobby that you don't like but it'd be in exchange for something that you don't like no that's not sustainable you know that on his end well they the reverse ascendant not really I can't force you into a hobby that'll be something you do because you enjoy it yeah I would rather spend my time doing things besides carnivals yeah it's cool that's what I got married exploiter I think we should watch Earthlings and you know they chitchat about it and you know of course she basically says no but of course it's not it's nothing like rock climbing I mean you know Isaac aka ask yourself he always uses these really extreme examples if people say they're gonna be vegan five days a week and not on weekends it's like oh so were you against slavery five days a week and not on weekends do you refuse to engage in rape five days a week but on weekends like right that's right that's right and your and so again the sort this is the first promise the video when I mentioning the first place is just that in contrast to sort of strangely judgemental perception of some of these Outsiders who are castigating veganism people who regard us as morally superior smug and exclusivist or exclusionist as trying to exclude from our lives any kind of meat eaters I think you know the the kind of lonesome lamentable reality is that for a lot of vegans like the woman who wrote this message they're desperate to be with somebody you know they're desperate to be loved and supported and appreciated in a world that seems incredibly bleak and hostile and you know ethically antithetical to their basic assumptions about good and evil and what's what's acceptable yeah and the Internet is a place where they can find those people so maybe that's the impression that these people on the inner I got that that's why vegans real life but in a sense the Internet is the exact opposite of reality right like so people so ask yourself has this discord server and they're all these people who can come on there and talk about veganism they can talk about from this very peculiar logical perspective that ask yourself as you know really invented from up you know you really created a new kind of fashion within veganism for this style of argumentation right but each one of those people is alone you know being like what do you you can call that a community you know what song I mean you said you can find other vegans on the internet I think you can search for them but I mean this this woman writing this do you think she's found anyone on the Internet I think she's all alone I think he's writing this message now at the end of her rope after however many years of being vegan and she's utterly fine pardon me she's utterly failed to find and keep friends made over the internet and you know it's true you can rant on the internet maybe somebody will hear it maybe somebody will listen it's better than ranting at a wall but it's actually not that different from writing you're ranting at a glowing box that you've got on the wall and yeah yeah you're right meat eaters can perceive us as having real cohesion and community from what they see on the internet but actually what you're seeing on the internet is a symptom of the exact opposite of the the mournful isolation that's so much of us living so that's it guys veganism the struggle is real [Music] evolution