how can you enjoy life when you can't enjoy food? yes, mass killing animals and eating corpses may not be the best thing in the world, but hey, these corpses sure taste good.
this is an issue that has vexed me for some time. am i giving up the right to pleasure? i mean, i'm not masochistic, am i? by turning vegetarian, am i missing out on some of the essential joys of life?
the exchange is this:
- a temporary moment of enjoyment of ingesting that juicy slab of meat
- a calm conscience that i'm not partaking in violence. i can look a cute puppy in the eye and not wonder why i had something more intelligent than him (i.e. a pig) for lunch. (most people are blissfully unaware of this, of course, lucky them.) it's difficult to describe, but it seems that i can now enjoy life a lot more on an overall basis.
the closest analogy i can think of is exercise. i mean, who likes to exercise? we're out of breath, our lungs are burning, our muscles are aching. the results are very nice, but in fact, exercising sucks for the most part - we feel really good when we stop. we're exchanging the temporary pain of exercising, for our overall sense of well-being. after a while, we even begin to possibly enjoy exercise. but, for a lot of us, it's difficult to classify exercise as a pure source of bliss in itself.
