What If Being Vegan Isn’t Enough? – Vegan Psychologist

I’m going to say something that might make some vegans uncomfortable, not because I want to provoke people, but because I think it’s one of the most important conversations many of us are not having.

Going vegan was obviously the essential ethical decision and one of the most profound shifts we have ever made in how we live and who we are. And yet, as much as I believe that with every part of me, I also believe it is not enough. Not even close.

The Fantasy We Tell Ourselves

There is a belief I hear constantly in the vegan community, and I understand exactly why people hold it. “If the world went vegan tomorrow, we’d all finally be happy.” When you are carrying vystopia every day, that crushing, relentless weight of knowing what is happening to billions of animals while the people around you eat, laugh, and look the other way, of course you fantasise about the day that weight finally lifts and you can breathe again.

But if we sit with that fantasy honestly for a moment, what is it actually telling us? It’s telling us that our only problem is the world, that we ourselves are fine, and that happiness is simply waiting on the other side of everyone else’s transformation. And as understandable as that feeling is, it’s not a recipe for change. It is a recipe for staying exactly where we are.

Because here is the truth that vystopia can make it easy to forget.

Vegans have relationships that fall apart. Vegans also struggle with money, purpose, identity, and self-worth. Vegans experience depression, anxiety, and a loneliness that often has nothing whatsoever to do with animal exploitation.

Vystopia sits on top of all of that but it doesn’t replace it, and if we imagine that removing it would suddenly make everything else fall into place, we only need to look at the non-vegans around us to see that simply not carrying this particular burden hasn’t made their lives uncomplicated or their hearts full.

The Philosophy That Stopped Me in My Tracks

I’ve been spending time recently with the philosophy of Agorism, developed by Samuel Edward Konkin III and laid out in his 1980 work The New Libertarian Manifesto, and one of its central principles is the “non-initiation of violence”, the idea that no coercion, no trespass, and no imposition of your will on others can ever be justified.

The moment I encountered it, I felt the resonance immediately, because of course this is the same foundation that veganism is built on. Non-violence. Non-exploitation. A deep respect for the autonomy and life of others.

And then I noticed something that I’ve been thinking about since.

Many of the Agorists I have encountered are genuinely passionate people. They speak compellingly about freedom of thought, freedom of movement, the erosion of individual rights, and the importance of resisting systems that coerce and control. They are, in their own domain, freedom fighters.

And yet in the same breath, they describe farming animals in their backyards and defending their absolute right to eat meat, their commitment to non-violence apparently stopping cleanly at the boundary between human and non-human animals.

Light-Bulb Moment

I’m not sharing this to simply criticise them, because what struck me far more than the contradiction itself was what it revealed when I held it up as a mirror. If intelligent, principled people who have built their entire philosophy around non-violence can carry a complete blind spot about animals, then what blind spots might we, as vegans, be carrying about humans?

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Let’s Talk About the Misanthropy

One of the documented symptoms of vystopia, particularly in its earlier stages, is misanthropy, a deep contempt for humans and their capacity for wilful blindness in the face of overwhelming evidence. I am not going to pretend this isn’t real, because it is profoundly real, and it makes complete sense when you understand what, as vegans, we are actually witnessing and living with every single day.

But I want to say something that I think is important, even if it’s uncomfortable to hear. Misanthropy is not a strategy. It is a symptom, and if we don’t do the work to move through it, it has a way of becoming the very thing that prevents us from doing what we came here to do.

Because the brutal truth, the one that every vegan who has ever tried to argue, shame, or guilt someone into changing already knows deep down, is that it doesn’t work. It feels righteous in the moment, and I understand that feeling completely, but:

Contempt does open people up. It closes them down.
Rage does not invite reflection. It triggers defensiveness.

The Contradiction We Need to Face

Agorists extend non-violence to humans but draw the line at animals. That is their blind spot, and it is a significant one.

But I want to ask whether vegans sometimes do something similar in the opposite direction, extending compassion fully to animals while allowing contempt, imposition, and something very close to coercion to shape how we engage with the humans we are trying to reach.

I am not talking about softening the message or pretending the suffering isn’t happening, because it is happening and the urgency is real. I am talking about the difference between:

Invitation and imposition
Influence and rage
Communicating in a way that opens people up
Communicating in a way that simply confirms what they already believed about us.

If we hold non-violence as a genuine principle rather than simply a dietary choice, then it has to extend to how we treat the humans who are not yet where we are, not because they deserve our patience, but because the animals deserve our effectiveness.

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This Is the Work

The vegans I work with in the Vystopia Transformation program arrive carrying everything I’ve described here, the grief, the rage, the isolation, the bone-deep exhaustion of being awake in a world that keeps hitting the snooze button, and the quiet, painful question of whether any of it is actually making a difference.

The transformation we work toward together is never about caring less, because caring less is never the answer, it is about moving from a place where the pain is controlling the communication to a place where the communication is genuinely serving the mission.

From despair to impact.
From isolation to influence.
From righteous anger to the kind of strategic, grounded compassion that actually changes minds and opens hearts, because that is what the animals need from us. Not our suffering. Our effectiveness.

Being vegan is the beginning, and it is a profound and necessary one. But learning to be an advocate who can genuinely reach people, who can invite rather than impose, who can hold the full weight of what they know while still extending humanity to those who don’t yet know it, that is the next step, and in many ways, it is the harder one.

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So Here Is My Challenge to You

Where might your non-violence stopping?

Is it at the species line, or does it extend to the humans you are trying to reach? Because if being vegan is the beginning, and I believe it’s the essential first step is, then this is what comes next.

Feel free to contact me with your comments, not just the comfortable ones.