I am a vegan. I have been a NEET most of my life, being financially dependent upon my father who has his own accounting firm. I worked for my father for a while. My father had a few clients that were ranchers and restaurants and things like that; I never liked working on these files. I recently started working at a logistics company. Part of my work involves drafting paperwork that accompanies each shipment. About 40% of these documents are for vegetable produce, 55% are for things like machinery and building materials, and around 5% is for fish, dairy products, and chicken.
I tend to do the work slowly and carelessly when I come across the latter types of files. I considered deliberate sabotage but worried it would be too obvious. I hate myself for voluntarily associating with these companies. I enjoyed the job up until I had to process a shipment for a truckload of thousands of day-old chicks. I found myself trying to rationalize it for a moment, reasoning that I could not be expected to find another job when this was all I could find; but really, I could leave and have chosen not to because I am scared of disappointing my father.
I searched for my predicament online and found many vegans rationalizing working at restaurants and grocery stores; this disgusted me. I am fortunate in that I have been able to abstract away the suffering that my existence has caused other living things. I am faced here with a predicament; I do not want to rationalize my actions as necessary or good, because they are neither. But even though I know it should be as easy as seeing myself doing a bad thing and not doing it anymore, I know that I won’t. Is there any way through this kind of sin? The sort you cannot abandon due to cowardice?
The obvious answer to my predicament seems to be countering the bad thing I am doing with efforts to combat the availability of meat more broadly (by e.g. supporting efforts to ban certain farming practices), but if we think of these lives as having a more or less equal worth to our own (and intellectually, if not emotionally, I sort of do), then this seems equivalent to handing a gun to someone who then shot a truckload of people but consoling yourself by saying that you worked to pass legislation that would made shooting truckloads of people illegal.
I tend to do the work slowly and carelessly when I come across the latter types of files. I considered deliberate sabotage but worried it would be too obvious. I hate myself for voluntarily associating with these companies. I enjoyed the job up until I had to process a shipment for a truckload of thousands of day-old chicks. I found myself trying to rationalize it for a moment, reasoning that I could not be expected to find another job when this was all I could find; but really, I could leave and have chosen not to because I am scared of disappointing my father.
I searched for my predicament online and found many vegans rationalizing working at restaurants and grocery stores; this disgusted me. I am fortunate in that I have been able to abstract away the suffering that my existence has caused other living things. I am faced here with a predicament; I do not want to rationalize my actions as necessary or good, because they are neither. But even though I know it should be as easy as seeing myself doing a bad thing and not doing it anymore, I know that I won’t. Is there any way through this kind of sin? The sort you cannot abandon due to cowardice?
The obvious answer to my predicament seems to be countering the bad thing I am doing with efforts to combat the availability of meat more broadly (by e.g. supporting efforts to ban certain farming practices), but if we think of these lives as having a more or less equal worth to our own (and intellectually, if not emotionally, I sort of do), then this seems equivalent to handing a gun to someone who then shot a truckload of people but consoling yourself by saying that you worked to pass legislation that would made shooting truckloads of people illegal.