I just read an interesting BBC article about why there are significantly more vegan women than men, which is mostly summarized by this statement at the top:

When women hold two incompatible beliefs, they’re more likely to change their behaviour to reconcile them. Men, by comparison, tend to dig themselves in.

The article cites a variety of studies that delve into gender differences and how these connect with dietary decisions. Reading it had an odd effect on me, making my vegan side feel good and my male side feel primitive and stupid.

While I do consider myself an ethical vegan today, this article reminded me that I didn’t go vegan for reasons of compassion or concern for the well-being of animals. While I was aware of factory farming and the cruel ways that animals were treated, that argument didn’t move me. I used to be one of those guys who’d hear those points and then want to eat a burger afterwards. I’m not proud of that, but it’s the truth.

I don’t think it was because I wanted to snub my nose at people trying to tell me what to do. It didn’t feel like I was trying to assert dominance either. I think it had a lot more to do with being out of touch with my feelings. I simply didn’t feel much compassion for animals. Either my heart was silent on the issue, or my brain couldn’t detect what my heart was saying.

I could know that animals were suffering, but this awareness remained on an intellectual level. It didn’t trigger any meaningful caring or compassion within me. I was more likely to think something like, “Sucks to be them, but oh well.” Watching animals in pain was almost like watching a balloon being popped. Animals were just objects, and their fate was of little consequence.

What ultimately got me to transition to veganism was curiosity, but more specifically it was about risk reduction. A prior personal growth experience made me aware of one of my blind spots, and this made me more open-minded about exploring and investigating other potential blind spots.

That prior blind spot was religion. I was raised within the bubble of Catholicism throughout my childhood, and I came to see it very differently when I was 17 years old. I left the Church behind and began exploring other points of view, which was massively transformational. That was one of the most growth-oriented times of my life. It sure took a lot of courage though. I had no help when I began leaning in that direction, so it was a very lonely path with plenty of resistance from other people. I really had to trust my intelligence and reasoning to get through it.

When I looked back on my religious upbringing after I transitioned away from it, I could see more clearly just how blind I was and how full of holes my previous beliefs and perspectives had been. For example, since atheists didn’t worship God, they were doomed to suffer for all eternity. And so when I eventually met an atheist boy, I wasn’t really sure how to relate to him. How exactly do you play sports with someone who’s doomed? Is it safe to be on the same team together? What if he touched me – was being doomed infectious, like cooties?

At first I felt sorry for the guy. He was older than me but obviously in a lot of trouble. I found it odd that he didn’t feel sorry for himself though. I’d assumed that a doomed boy should be more messed up. He seemed totally fine and normal for a boy his age, even nicer than most. That situation created a cognitive disconnect.

When I learned about vegetarianism and veganism some years later, part of me recognized that this could be another of those situations where the insider and outsider perspectives are very different. I realized that if I only explored one side, I’d never really understand the other side, and there was a very real risk that I could be stuck in another thought bubble. That meant that if I didn’t try the opposite for at least a short time, like a month or so, I could potentially be doing the equivalent of remaining Catholic for life without ever understanding what a non-Catholic perspective was like. I shuddered at the thought.

I saw this as an enormous risk, one that I couldn’t ignore. The risk that I might inadvertently do the equivalent of spending my whole life Catholic really bothered me. What if the diet I was raised to eat was another one of those areas where I’d be wrong and deluded all along? I had to find out if that was true or not.

Once I adopted this framing, it was pretty much inevitable that I’d eventually do some personal exploration in this direction. It was just a matter of figuring out when and how to fit this experiment into my life. I started with a 30-day vegetarian trial between semesters in college in 1993. And then 3.5 years later, I did a 30-day vegan trial in January 1997. Both of those experiments became permanent lifestyle changes.

Again, compassion wasn’t one of my reasons for doing these experiments. I was much more concerned about the risk of getting stuck for life in a potentially erroneous thought bubble. The huge differences between the inside and outside perspectives of Catholicism were still fresh in my mind, even though I didn’t begin these diet experiments till about 5 years after the transition from religion.

My memories of the prior transition were frequently refreshed – whenever I’d pass a church, see a church on TV, or interact with family. Even seeing Ned Flanders or Reverend Lovejoy on The Simpsons was a reminder of the trap I’d successfully escaped – and a powerful warning that I could still be trapped inside another bubble.

So for me this exploration wasn’t really about getting into vegetarianism and veganism. It was about exploring outside of the reality bubble of animal products. I absolutely needed to know what was outside of that bubble. Not discovering the truth for myself was too great a risk.

I had learned the hard lesson that I couldn’t trust the people around me. When I was surrounded by religious people, we were all inside the same thought bubble together. It was only when I spotted a window to an outside world – in the form of meeting a nice doomed boy – that I began to wonder if I might be missing something.

So truth poked my bubble. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

I wasn’t at all sure what the exterior perspective would be like though. When I did my 30-day vegetarian trial, it really was just a trial. I had no expectation that it would stick. I assumed it was just going to be a temporary experiment and that I’d be back to eating animals on Day 31. My intention was to explore and experience vegetarianism, so I would finally know what it was like. But I didn’t actually want it to stick. I wanted to open the door to answer truth’s knock, hear the sales pitch, and then say, “No, thank you,” and close the door like I was dismissing a couple of Mormons on a mission. I wanted to reassure myself that it was fine to return to my old diet since I had checked to see what life was like outside that bubble. I wanted to make sure that my dietary thought bubble was okay and that I didn’t have to abandon it.

Of course my assumption was wrong. It took perhaps six months to realize that I wasn’t going to return to eating animals. With the 30-day vegan trial, it didn’t take as long. If I recall correctly, I felt that I’d continue with veganism even before the initial 30-days were up. The first week of seeing all that dairy clog purging itself from my body helped to convince me that I should never put that gunk back inside me again.

These days I care a lot about animals. I feel for them in ways I never felt when I ate their flesh and eggs and drank the milk intended for their babies. My relationship with animals used to be one of entitlement and indifference, and I didn’t see anything wrong with that. I didn’t feel what I feel today. These feelings simply didn’t exist in the old bubble.

Going vegetarian and then vegan really helped to clean and revitalize my heart-brain connection, but I had no idea that I was missing anything when I started exploring in this direction. I gained a sense of empathy and compassion that I couldn’t remember feeling previously, except maybe in some vague memories from when I was very young.

Reading that article about the stubbornness of men hit home with me because it reminded me of what I was like in the old bubble. I feel so grateful that somehow I found an intellectual backdoor that enabled me to escape it. While I went vegan as an experiment to address a potential risk, I remain vegan for a much stronger set of reasons. I’m no longer indifferent and emotionally out of touch like I used to be. My ability to treat animals as products was an artifact of a thought bubble I left behind a long time ago. While I was in that bubble, I couldn’t connect with their beauty.

I spent many years of my life inside a thought bubble of animal neglect and abuse. While it’s not one I’ve visited for many years, I remember well enough what it was like on the inside. From the inside it doesn’t look like abuse. It just seems normal. I can recall plenty of meals with friends back in the day where animals were part of the experience, and it didn’t seem strange at the time.

I can also see why many men aren’t persuaded to explore veganism by the compassion argument. I understand how some pro-vegan arguments could make some men want to do the opposite. I don’t really think this attitude has so much to do with asserting dominance over animals though. I think it’s really a form of clinginess to the familiar thought bubble. It’s a retreat from a perceived threat. The response is more fear-based than many men would care to admit. It’s a retreat from a potential truth.

What convinced me to explore beyond the bubble was that I recognized a potentially greater threat – that I could be stuck inside a very limiting subset of reality that could trap me for life if I was too passive. The only way to know if I was indeed trapped was to explore beyond the cage. I had to know what was outside. And when I saw that life was better outside, I saw the cage for the trap it was, and I never wanted to return to it again, just as I never wanted to return to my old religious cage again.

Veganism isn’t a restrictive form of eating or lifestyle. It’s entirely the opposite of that. It’s immensely freeing to live outside of the old cage. This path helped me develop senses that I didn’t know I could possess. It invited me on a tremendous journey of upgrading my relationships with animals, with people, with life, and with reality.

The experience of escaping the old bubble was similar to realizing that I never had to go to confession again – no more sharing my sins with a creepy collared guy. My old relationship with animals was creepy as hell. But like the creepiness of confession, I couldn’t see or acknowledge that creepiness from within the bubble. Such is the nature of a thought bubble – you can only see the full truth of it when you experience the inside and the outside for enough time, and then compare notes.

This makes me wonder what kind of framing could have sped me along and helped me progress faster when I was younger. If the compassion argument would have fallen on deaf ears, what argument might have influenced me to explore outside my bubble sooner?

I think there is a better argument that would have worked, and it’s largely what I shared here. You could call it the Bubble Boy frame.

I was developing a healthy respect for people who explored beyond the bubbles that I grew up with. Once I had popped my first major bubble, I gained a much weightier understanding of the risks of not even seeing a bubble in which I could potentially be trapped for life. Considering that I could still be going to mass every Sunday – and confession too – if I hadn’t seen the bubble for what it was is creepy as hell.

That’s still a convincing argument for me today. This perspective has nudged me to explore outside of other bubbles that I was raised with – the bubble of employment, the bubble of monogamy, and so on.

The desire to discover new truths is compelling, but even more compelling is the desire to avoid spending your whole life in a cage and never even seeing the cage.

So I think I’d have found the perspectives of the cage, the bubble, and the trap a lot more compelling than any compassion-based arguments. Those lenses got me moving even when my heart-brain connection was offline. I didn’t want to spend my life as a bubble boy or cage boy.

These days those perspectives aren’t as compelling as they used to be. They still feel relevant and meaningful sometimes, but I now find it simpler to trust my default heart-brain intelligence instead of needing to lean on the bubble boy crutch for guidance. I am super grateful that I came upon that crutch when I did though. It was an empowering perspective – not the only tool in the toolbox but certainly an effective one for escaping nearly invisible cages.

By being vegan for as long as I have (and vegetarian a few years before that), about 5000 fewer animals were harmed and killed by my lifestyle.

But since I blogged about this aspect of my lifestyle (including writing my longest article ever, called How to Be Vegan), I’ve since influenced hundreds (if not thousands) more people to try vegetarianism or veganism for months or years or to adopt such a lifestyle permanently. So the combined impact of going vegan and publicly sharing what I learned is likely beyond 1,000,000 animals by now. That’s based mainly on feedback people have shared with me over the years.

And then since many of those people I influenced have also influenced others in similar ways, some of them very actively, the total ripples are probably somewhere in the millions of animals… and still going.

Maybe this impact is a drop in the bucket relative to the 50 billion animals killed for food each year, but one drop can still create ripples. And of course we could identify more ripples such as the resource savings like water and electricity, the reduction in emissions, etc.

When we create a change for personal reasons, we often don’t see how far the ripples of personal change will extend beyond ourselves.

And similarly, when we don’t change ourselves, we don’t get to see the positive ripples that could have come into existence, if only we’d taken a few more steps.

What’s most personally meaningful to me about this aspect of my lifestyle, however, is the internal shift it created within me and some other ripples created by that shift.

What many people don’t realize is that if I hadn’t gone vegan more than 2 decades ago, I wouldn’t have started my personal development blog 15 years ago. I wouldn’t have written articles in an effort to be helpful. I wouldn’t have cared enough to do something like that. Doing this kind of work takes way more heart energy than I used to have. The voice of caring just wasn’t loud enough or strong enough to motivate this much action or this long of a commitment.

My sense of caring about people is inextricably linked to caring about animals. What may seem counter-intuitive though is that I also care more about non-vegans than I used to. You might think that the opposite would be true. Wouldn’t going vegan make me feel more disconnected from non-vegans? After all, such people hurt animals, which I care about.

As a vegan I feel more emotional pain than I use to. But I also feel more love and connection than I used to. They come as a package deal.

When someone hurts animals, for food or otherwise, I feel the pain of that. It stings my heart. When I’m at my best, I don’t try to numb myself to such feelings. I allow them to have their say. I see those feelings as important. They remind me that I care. I remember what it was like not to care about such things and to feel no sting at all, and I have no desire to return to such an existence. I like having stronger feelings of caring and connection, and I accept that a heightened sensitivity to violence is part of that.

Caring is difficult but also beautiful. Truth be told, seeing ripples that reduce the number of animals harmed and killed doesn’t do much for me motivationally. Maybe it’s nice karmically, but I feel the most alignment juice from the heightened sense of caring.

Going vegan many years ago seems to have created some kind of permanent shift in my vibe that I can’t undo – and wouldn’t want to undo. One of the scariest things to me in life would be to return to a state of emotional numbness and to forget what it feels like to care a lot.

Even though it can be hard, I like being sensitive to the pain of other beings. I like that I can sense the vibes of suffering, like a radio transmission that never turns off. Those signals are so much louder and clearer than they once were. There is a lot of suffering in the world, and a lot more of it is coming from animals than humans. As much as we can point to human suffering, we’d need to hurt and kill 7x the planet’s human population every year just to match what animals are going through. And we’d have to achieve that population through a massive increase in rape to match the forced reproduction those animals endure.

If you’re sensitive to vibes, turn your heart towards human suffering and listen for a while. Then turn your heart towards animal suffering, and notice how that signal sounds. When I do this, I certainly feel some sorrow on the human side. The animal side is overwhelmingly sad though; I can’t listen to it for more than 30 seconds without crying.

It may sound odd to label this sensitivity as beautiful, but somehow it just seems accurate. Because of our ears, we may be disturbed by unpleasant noise now and then, but isn’t it worth the price if it means we can hear beautiful music and communicate with each other?

So many of my articles were written from a desire to be helpful, often because I picked up a signal of human sadness, struggle, stuckness, or confusion – or even curiosity or wonder. Somehow those signals are just so loud and clear most of the time. All I have to do is listen, and the writing and speaking takes care of itself. When the heart is aligned, the brain does what it’s supposed to do.

So many issues that I struggled with in the past just seemed to resolve themselves when I listened more with my heart instead of always trying to plan, strategize, and force things with my head. The voice of caring provides such a beautiful form of guidance. So much clarity flows from the simplicity of caring.

When I think back to my pre-vegan days, it feels like a time of darkness. I just had no idea how emotionally numb I was back then… and how vibrationally unaware and insensitive I was. I couldn’t even fathom what more was eventually going to be possible. What I now label as numbness or darkness, back then I would have simply called feeling normal or neutral. I had no idea how quiet my “normal” world was back then.

Today what I consider normal is to feel an abundance of vibrational and emotional signals. These signals are always flowing, circulating, and broadcasting. People want help. Animals want even more help.

One of the strongest human signals I hear these days is a desire to feel connected. I sense so much loneliness, aloneness, and disconnection. Many people have become so numb and desensitized, yet they still yearn for something more – something they can’t even define. Some part of them wants to be embraced by love, connection, healing, understanding, acceptance, appreciation, and acknowledgement. Even though the world is more connected than ever tech-wise, today’s outlets are letting people down on the emotional side. It’s ironic that the more connected we become, the less connected many people feel.

I think part of the solution is to listen more to pain… not just your own pain but the pain signals that are constantly being broadcast. Pain signals are usually louder than pleasure, joy, and delight. Happiness purrs while pain screams.

If you want to hear the loudest pain signals on earth, go within, tune into your heart, and then listen with your heart to the signals being broadcast by animals right now. Listen to the 23 billion chickens on the planet right now… or the 1 billion cows… or the 780 million pigs. Listen to the ones that are slated for your consumption if you feel entitled to some of their bodies. Can you hear what they’re broadcasting? What do you sense when you tune in and just listen for a while?

Sensitivity to pain is also sensitivity to so much more – love, beauty, inspiration, creativity, fun, and so many other frequencies that make this life precious and worthwhile.

It’s easy to find conscious people with a variety of dietary lifestyles, vegan or non-vegan alike. But where I tend to see mostly agreement is in terms of how animals are currently being treated by humans. It’s hard to find people who consciously agree with our current practices.

If you consciously choose to continue participating in the treatment of animals as products, I suggest that you stay tuned into their pain. If you’re going to continue opting in, I think it’s wiser and more beneficial to you to feel the hurt and the pain as opposed to numbing yourself. Feel the ripples you’re supporting. Invite and accept the future pain of the thousands of animals who have yet to be hurt and killed from your actions. Feel the ongoing rapes and forced pregnancies to spawn these animals. Don’t run from this reality. Don’t tune out from it. Don’t try to pretend that this pain isn’t real. These are loud signals. Listen to them and tune in.

Listen whenever you purchase animal products. Listen while you cook. Listen with every bite. Let these signals have their say. Let them speak to you honestly and directly. Hear the screams again and again and again.

And each day, choose consciously what you’ll eat and how you’ll live.

I know… it takes courage to do this. It’s a growth experience, regardless of where you land afterwards.

If you can listen to the screams each time and still maintain your current lifestyle, then great – you’re aligned. If you can listen to the screams and feel compelled to change your lifestyle, also great… you can create the alignment you desire. But if you can only maintain your lifestyle by tuning out or trying to numb yourself to the reality and the ripples, that’s a glaring misalignment to address, wouldn’t you say? If you’re going to participate in the flow of hurting, raping, and killing animals, then do so consciously. Don’t go dark or numb just because you dislike the screams. If you’re okay with contributing to ripples of suffering, them the screams should serve as a palatable sauce that makes your meals richer and more meaningful. This can be your way of honoring the thousands of animals who sacrifice their lives for you. Don’t discount or diminish their pain. Appreciate what they’ve done for you because of the high price they repeatedly pay to appear on your plate.

If you’re going to contribute to the screams, then appreciate the screams. If an animal had to give its life or its milk or eggs to please your palate, don’t you think those animals deserve some appreciation at the very the least? When you tune into the screams, beam back your best vibrational thank you.

If you consciously choose to prey on the weak, appreciate the weakness that empowers you to do so. Consciously own the part of you that feels aligned with thoroughly dominating other living beings.

If you can do that, you need never be fearful of vegans. You can stand firm and simply own what you’ve decided is right for you. You ought to be able to make statements such as these:

• I feel aligned with dominating weaker beings and placing their lives in service to me.
• I feel aligned with the efficient breeding, feeding, and killing of animals for my benefit.
• I feel aligned with contributing to the pain of animals.
• The pain that animals endure enhances the appreciation of my meals.

If such statements feel misaligned to you and you can’t see yourself embracing such an attitude, you’ve got some realignment work to do. And of course if you can embrace such attitudes, they’ll create similar ripples throughout your human relationships as well.

In short, if you’re going to cause pain, it’s important to love the pain you’re causing. Consciously acknowledge, accept, and embrace the pain as an honest and authentic part of your lifestyle. That pain is real. That pain happens every day. Stay aligned with the truth.

Generating pain is a normal and routine part of the package of treating animals as products. If you think it’s okay to treat animals as products, then get yourself aligned with contributing to ongoing ripples of pain. And listen to the screams since that’s part of your truth.

If you don’t listen to the screams of the world, you won’t be sensitive to the real depths of joy and connection either.