I think being vegan makes me lose 5 minutes of productivity per week.
Okay, it looks like this is where we’ve been talking past each other. I agree with you that if being vegan costs only a few minutes per week, then switching to eat meat would be a bizarre thing to do.
For me, when I spent a year being vegan, I felt near-constantly unsatiated and low on energy, irritable and mentally slow.[1] My guess was that this was costing me as much as 30% of my productivity, or ~18 hours per week. The internal experience for me was something like, “Okay, I’ve already changed jobs to try to do good directly, which involved life sacrifices, and I already donate. Adding this being-hungry-and-irritable-the-whole-time thing on top is a step further than I’m willing to go. In fact, if I take this step, I might be more likely to burn out and become disillusioned with all this altruism business.”
It may well be that I’m unusually ill-suited to a vegan diet,[2] and that my original comment reflects typical mind fallacy on my part. When I wrote that comment, I was non-consciously assuming that: 1) for a nontrivial number of people working directly in x-risk reduction, being vegan would, or does, incur a cost on the order of a few hours (as opposed to a few minutes) of productive work per week; 2) struggles like mine are common enough stories[3] in vegan and vegan-adjacent circles that readers would understand 1, or something close to 1, to be my background assumption.
And I did try hard to make the vegan diet work. I was tracking all my vitamins and nutrients and consuming ample calories. I’d also put in an “upfront” effort of at least 10 hours of reading about vegan diet pitfalls (and how to avoid them), researching supplements, and experimenting with vegan foods and recipes.
(Possibly also worth mentioning: 1| Nowadays, I’m reducetarian, at 60% meat consumption relative to before my failed vegan conversion. 2| I expect my non-vegan diet, both now and before, is 99th percentile for healthfulness (i.e., it’s nothing close to the average British or American diet; I was an athlete in college and received substantial nutrition coaching). I mention this to acknowledge that my vegan diet was up against a very high—perhaps unfairly high—baseline.)
I remember coming across a large (~20k members) Reddit community at the time—I think it might have been r/AntiVegan—which, as best I could tell, was partially (mostly?) made up of former vegans. These former vegans would recount the negative health effects they’d experienced while being vegan. I took this as pretty strong evidence that (plenty of) other people out there had had as rough a time trying to be vegan as I did.
Yep, in retrospect, my “5 minutes” remark didn’t sufficiently account for the adjustment period. I went through a similar adjustment to yours, and spent several months constantly hungry and low energy. (The mental slowness sounds like a symptom of B12 deficiency, which I had at first, but stopped once I started supplementing.) By a year’s end, I was back to normal. I can see how my comment could have been understood as diminishing what you went through, which wasn’t my intention :)
I agree that burnout is important to stave, and being dedicated to sufficiently altruistic pursuits can help you accomplish a lot more good than your dietary choices.
As a compromise, what do you think about choosing beef when it’s an option rather than other meat choices (chicken or pork)? In terms of suffering reduction, a non-vegan diet where beef is the only meat consumed is perhaps 90% of the way there.
Thanks for your constructive reply.
Okay, it looks like this is where we’ve been talking past each other. I agree with you that if being vegan costs only a few minutes per week, then switching to eat meat would be a bizarre thing to do.
For me, when I spent a year being vegan, I felt near-constantly unsatiated and low on energy, irritable and mentally slow.[1] My guess was that this was costing me as much as 30% of my productivity, or ~18 hours per week. The internal experience for me was something like, “Okay, I’ve already changed jobs to try to do good directly, which involved life sacrifices, and I already donate. Adding this being-hungry-and-irritable-the-whole-time thing on top is a step further than I’m willing to go. In fact, if I take this step, I might be more likely to burn out and become disillusioned with all this altruism business.”
It may well be that I’m unusually ill-suited to a vegan diet,[2] and that my original comment reflects typical mind fallacy on my part. When I wrote that comment, I was non-consciously assuming that: 1) for a nontrivial number of people working directly in x-risk reduction, being vegan would, or does, incur a cost on the order of a few hours (as opposed to a few minutes) of productive work per week; 2) struggles like mine are common enough stories[3] in vegan and vegan-adjacent circles that readers would understand 1, or something close to 1, to be my background assumption.
And I did try hard to make the vegan diet work. I was tracking all my vitamins and nutrients and consuming ample calories. I’d also put in an “upfront” effort of at least 10 hours of reading about vegan diet pitfalls (and how to avoid them), researching supplements, and experimenting with vegan foods and recipes.
(Possibly also worth mentioning: 1| Nowadays, I’m reducetarian, at 60% meat consumption relative to before my failed vegan conversion. 2| I expect my non-vegan diet, both now and before, is 99th percentile for healthfulness (i.e., it’s nothing close to the average British or American diet; I was an athlete in college and received substantial nutrition coaching). I mention this to acknowledge that my vegan diet was up against a very high—perhaps unfairly high—baseline.)
In moral trade terms, being vegan is probably far from my comparative advantage.
I remember coming across a large (~20k members) Reddit community at the time—I think it might have been r/AntiVegan—which, as best I could tell, was partially (mostly?) made up of former vegans. These former vegans would recount the negative health effects they’d experienced while being vegan. I took this as pretty strong evidence that (plenty of) other people out there had had as rough a time trying to be vegan as I did.
Yep, in retrospect, my “5 minutes” remark didn’t sufficiently account for the adjustment period. I went through a similar adjustment to yours, and spent several months constantly hungry and low energy. (The mental slowness sounds like a symptom of B12 deficiency, which I had at first, but stopped once I started supplementing.) By a year’s end, I was back to normal. I can see how my comment could have been understood as diminishing what you went through, which wasn’t my intention :)
I agree that burnout is important to stave, and being dedicated to sufficiently altruistic pursuits can help you accomplish a lot more good than your dietary choices.
As a compromise, what do you think about choosing beef when it’s an option rather than other meat choices (chicken or pork)? In terms of suffering reduction, a non-vegan diet where beef is the only meat consumed is perhaps 90% of the way there.