The Straw and the Camel's back

I recently had a colleague complain that oat milk was a 'luxury' that the work coffee machines didn't need. And this tiny little comment kind of broke me. I feel like I am so careful not to judge or lecture everyone around me for their insanely massive moral failings around animal welfare, or donating - yet apparently people can't even just let me have my suffering-free milk in peace. 

Which prompted me to re-evaluate something I hadn't really thought about in a long time - being EA (or EA-adjacent or however people wanna identify) is just really hard sometimes. I used to be more actively advocatey about things, but it can be exhausting, and at some point I just kinda stopped. But now I feel very motivated to figure out how to start being a lil more vocal again, because it turns out that pretending like I don't have strong opinions on these things is also exhausting!

Which is all to get to the point of: there are a lot of posts on here about EA being hard, and how to talk about EA, and reading those posts helps get a feeling of support but knowing this doesn't magically make it all easier. I am just really grateful for this awesome community, and want to just normalise a bit more to share when it gets hard because thats ok. We are doing a hard thing. 

(Note: while this one colleague clearly pushed my buttons, further reflection got me very happy that clearly a bunch of other people had been advocating to get the oat milk at LUMC and I'm very happy they exist and that they succeeded)
 

But what great photos!!! 
So glad Jan had some bear cuddles for support, Swapcard is draining!

Me too!!! I've been using it for a few weeks now (pronoucing it Co-Jee) and it works, I am trying to make it happen!

I agree I think EA connects are valuable and could be more so if we treated them in this way. Personally - I would probably have put more effort into EA connect this year if it hadn't been the weekend before EAGx Amsterdam... I felt a lil EA overloaded. Though with the number of EAGx events these days I'm not sure how feasible it even is to plan the EA Connect event NOT close to at least some EAGx somewhere!

I think it was more having the arguments put forth to me by people I thought of as more rational (my sister tends towards the dramatic in general*, I think that made it easier to avoid her arguments). But yeah having numbers and data definitely helped, and adding in the climate change POV rather than solely focussing on the more confronting animal welfare aspects. Its like, that got me over the cognitive dissonce and then once on the other side all the animal welfare arguments could suddenly sink in. 

*not to be too harsh to my sister, we were also just teenagers and sisters are annoying haha, but once we were older, for actually implementing the diet in my life, she was very very helpful :)

As someone who ignored the pleas of my vegan sister for many many years, I have been on the gaslighting side I guess (and now feel awful about it). Then I discovered EA and became vegan, so I think there is something here about how different arguments work for different people. But, I do still really find it confusing the most people don't care about animal suffering - I am now so totally 110% convinced, and I don't even like animals very much, so how do animals lovers still eat meat??? 

This was so nice to read.  I just reached 10y anniversary for my GWWC pledge (Eeeeee!) and have also been thinking a bit about whether it feels different now or anything. I didn't have anything so nice as an email thread to go back to, so its very easy to say "oh yeah this is totally where I would have expected to be" but I honestly do not actually recall what 2014 Jo expected of herself haha. 

Exciting!!! Wish I could come back and join you guys :)

"oh these young EA whippersnappers, expecting so much!" is exactly how I feel sometimes! Thank you so much for writing this post, its brilliant (Read also as 'you' are brilliant) :)

I was thinking along these same lines but for skin-microbiota... we are lagging behind understanding this compared to gut-microbiota but it seems like the diversity is pretty important to our overall health? Its probably only a risk worth considering for the "install it in all the offices" rather than against using far-UVC in pandemic situations, but I guess research would be needed to assess the risks for skin disorders, or whatever else these microbiota might be important for?