epistemic status: just a rambly report of thoughts and feelings after doing something.
at 2026-09-19T16:39, i tapped my card against the register. from that moment onwards, from that point on, i'm no longer vegan. i didn't keep track of when i started, but i'm sure that it has been more than a year.
as a result of my actions, the supermarket will register the sale of one more tub of ice cream, a pack of cheese sticks and a cheese pretzel and will order more of those products slightly earlier than it otherwise would have. to meet this demand, the suppliers will now have a small but measurable fraction more of the incentive that leads them to keep cows and chickens confined to produce milk and eggs that go into producing the refill.
i don't think it's great that the above is happening, but i feel like it's been coming for a long time. when i went vegan, one of the things that made me commit was that it was simply “an experiment to see if i could do it” and at first, it seemed like the obvious choice. i started trying more vegan meat alternatives, ways to prepare tofu and started cooking a whole lot more than i usually would. cafeteria food was also no problem, since my university offers a vegan meal every day. however, over time, being vegan was something that – especially compared to being vegetarian – required active mental upkeep, as it requires taking actions in lots of ways that non-vegans don't have to.
taking supplements, looking out for vegan restaurants and the aforementioned cooking when the cafeteria option was dissatisfying. at the same time, my desire for foods like cheese hadn't diminished like it has done for meat. the few times when i accidentally got a meal with meat, i felt bad about it and tried to get rid of it. when the same happened with a meal containing milk or eggs, i just can't say i had the same reaction.
in the last few weeks, i've found myself increasingly losing motivation to keep up with this. i've found myself with little energy and cooking almost every day is fine if you want to, but having to do it is a chore that i don't want to spend the energy on. at the same time, i've noticed that the vegan food options at the nearest supermarket were diminishing, especially when it comes to frozen food. while i feel a bit saddened that it has come to this, i don't think there's any way out of this that doesn't involve dropping the commitment to veganism.
i do have to admit that, after pre-grieving it for a bit, the best way to describe how i feel about it right now is “freed”.
another thing that's also on my mind is the loss of a signal that i used to care about a lot. many vegans take pride in not participating in a large cause of suffering in the world as much as possible, and i think it's reasonable to think less of people who willingly do. i feel like being vegan is an obvious license to talk about ethics that i'm hereby taking away from myself by no longer being part of the single digit percentage of the population that exceeds at it. i don't believe there's anything really subjective about this. my place on the “ethics leaderboard”, if someone were to keep one has gone down quite a lot in this, and yet i proceed.
one objection i might consider is that i was really being ineffective over the last few months, and as a 20something year old student, the most important thing in your life ethically is to succeed so that you have more power to shape the world later. in the extreme, i would without a doubt prefer to become a technocapital millionaire who donates to animal charity over someone who didn't fix their nutrient deficiency, dropped out from low energy and eats their tofu somewhere in the middle of nowhere. i do not know if this would flesh out.
i don't really think i did anything wrong with my veganism or that it could be fixed easily. i got a blood test and when that said slightly low b12 and d3 once, i took more supplements than i was taking before. if health is the reason for quitting, then i don't think it's a certain choice but maybe “throwing something at the wall and seeing if it sticks” is worth it.
in the last few days, i have been reading a lot of blogs, searching up vegan info on twitter. i found many convincing cases for going vegan and it still feels like there's no truly principled case against it. however, i don't think i can keep up the principle anymore.
i'll see how i feel about it in a couple of years. i hope that this will all be solved and lab grown cheese will be on the shelves and it doesn't matter in a couple of years. until then, the best i feel i can do is be honest in writing this down, and consuming what i feel is best.
onward to vegetarianism
my takeaway is that i'll probably stay vegetarian. there's much to be said about whether that commitment is the least unethical of the non-vegan ones, but it has a few things going for it. it's quite easy to implement, as it's based on easily describable food categories (“no meat/fish, since you have to kill the animal to produce them”) instead of the more blurry lines that other people seem to choose (“ethically farmed according to some selection of labellers that i'd need to establish trust for”)