Life As We Know It Must End; Growing Pains
If you're a regular reader, by now you know that i'm a fan of controversial opinions. Here's another one; endings are healthy and necessary. This sounds like a simple truth, but i mean things like death, wildfires, breakups, leaving things behind, etcetera. From what i understand, many and most people greet these kinds of experiences with sorrow, anger, feelings of injustice, and especially fear of the unknown to follow. There are perfectly natural and healthy responses, but on the other hand, our disdain for these feelings causes us to avoid endings, often at somewhat extreme costs.
I genetically inherited impacted wisdom teeth. Just two of them. We found out about this when i was around maybe fourteen? I'm not certain, but i've known for years that i had impacted wisdom teeth. I've learned that our family dentist saw the position my teeth were in and his prognosis was to wait until they were closer to the surface to have them removed, considering the expense difference between surgical extraction of embedded teeth versus dental extraction of erupted teeth. So we waited, i was sixteen and still had no wisdom teeth. I was eighteen and still living at home, and still had no wisdom teeth. And then i was twenty, out of the house, working for my own income, and my parents had claimed me as a dependent on their taxes for the last time. My wisdom teeth appeared. It was uncomfortable from the start. Then they first started growing in and cutting my gums, the soft tissue was swollen and my constantly gnashing on it was far from helpful, but my resting closed jaw put moderate pressure on my already inflamed gums. It stayed that way until they were fully erupted, at which point the discomfort was generally reserved for when i was eating, and occasionally if i moved my jaw the wrong way.
Now, if you're unfamiliar, erupted impacted wisdom teeth look kinda like this:
This is hugely problematic, not only due to the discomfort it causes, but also because impacted wisdom teeth are nearly impossible to keep properly clean. It is possible, but would require rigorous, frequent, and painful maintenance multiple times a day. That's no way to live a life. As a result, impacted wisdom teeth, when left ill-attended for obvious reasons, are seriously prone to cavities and tooth decay which is literally impossible for a dentist to address in the position the teeth are in, as well as what happened in my case.
I wanted so badly to keep my wisdom teeth. I want to learn and know as much as i possibly can and they're called wisdom teeth. My experience of teething as an adult shed quite a bit of light on the reason we call them this. I was so excited when they first started cutting my gums and peeking out into the open world. It was painful and uncomfortable for sure, but i was hitting a major landmark in the development of humans into adulthood. I felt that the coming period of time would hold major realizations, healing from my many other ailments, physical and emotional, and a wisening up that can only be achieved by teething as an adult. I also felt incredibly sentimental about them. I already grew all my other teeth and had been using them for years, they were familiar. But these new teeth made me feel like a grandma does each time a new grandchild is born. The newest ones are the littlest, the most precious. My new wisdom teeth made me a more advanced human, especially considering i was born with all four, which is becoming more and more rare. I wanted them. Once they were mostly erupted, i actively used them for chewing. I looked at them and took care of them often. I was flossing and rinsing daily, and specifically used the pick on my flossers to clean underneath the gum flap that covered about a third of each of my bottom wisdom teeth.
I knew i couldn't keep them. Years--nay, decades of experience and research dictated that impacted wisdom teeth are unsustainable. I knew this and fought it anyway. Another reason i was so reluctant to have them removed, of course, was the cost. I didn't know how much it might end up being, but i knew it wasn't covered by all insurances, and i knew it was gonna be a lot out of pocket. Eventually this became my only justification. My dental hygiene regime became cumbersome to me--and the very worst part was when i started getting sick.
No matter how hard i tried, how clean i got my third molars every day, the simple fact of the matter was that the perpetual inflammation was putting a significant strain on my entire immune system. I can't even remember exactly when i first started getting sick, because it was so inconspicuously insidious. Maybe at first it was just a little fatigue. I was eating less often because chewing was uncomfortable. Then there was the emotional exhaustion. Literally everything just took such a toll on me, i was still working, but just barely. I showed up for every shift to take orders and make drinks, but i was hardly there. At some point, my whole body just started aching. I started getting massages in this period of time in attempts to feel better, but it was never long before i felt more sore than before i got the last massage, and it always felt like it was too soon. Then, i think, the cough. That was the last thing that came up, and i don't really remember when it came either, probably because i was so absent from myself. My body was a remotely inhospitable place for my life. I even actually got so depressed that my boss checked on me, and then after i started to feel better again he told me he was thinking of letting me go before my most recent attitude shift.
Now, there were a couple of other circumstances that contributed to my suffering, but all were self-inflicted, and the wisdom teeth were the major highlight of them. Fortunately my situation never became quite extreme, but i still went to greater measures than i believe most people would to keep these entities that were slowly draining the life out of me. I had them removed on the first of this month.
Now, weeks later, i am considerably happier and healthier. I still am in possession of the physical teeth, but two things needed to end lest i fall victim to the very worst i am capable of inflicting on myself. I needed to end my relationship with my wisdom teeth, and i needed to let go of the money it would take to have them removed. I was pretty uncomfortable, before, and especially right after the procedure. It was the dark before the dawn, and it is always darkest before the dawn. Things often have to get worse before they can get better. And i still have my wisdom teeth. I have virtually no use for them other than the satisfaction i feel from knowing i still have them. I still have a current relationship with my wisdom teeth, just now there is a much greater distance between us, and our relationship is infinitely healthier. I can thrive again now that i've let go of them.
Odds are you've heard the word "unsustainable" at some point in your life, if it isn't something you see regularly or often lately. There is a plethora of examples i could use, but i think the one most personal to me that i'll choose to use in this post for today is carnism. Sorry, not sorry, this is my blog and i'm vegan so i'm about to preach. If you don't wanna see it, stop reading now.
Carnism predates history. Many and most people would agree that carnism is an integral aspect of humanity. A vast and diverse number of non-human animals are carnivores and eat nothing but meat. Eating meat is normal, and even as a vegan i would say healthy--in moderation. We have teeth that are evolved for the purpose of cutting and tearing fleshy substances, and hybrid molars for grinding up not just any material, but tough, sinewy meat. Our digestive systems assimilate meat into our bodies in a way that can sustain us for days without eating again, depending on the quantity of meat consumed. There is even a particular kind of protein in animal meat that many dietary consultants and nutritionists consider necessary for a balanced healthy diet. I don't believe in positives and negatives as an existentialist-leaning philosopher, so i won't tell you you're wrong or evil for eating meat, especially because i don't think that at all.
However, evolution is constantly changing us. No child has EVER been identical to either of their parents. This is something we can easily observe, and is a verifiable fact. We can even prove that evolution exists based on researched information gathered from the study of an eclipse of moths (i'm a fan of using accurate terms for groups of animals, they're always so fun). Humans have a tendency to convince ourselves and one another that we've somehow "won" evolution, that it doesn't apply to us. The truth is, we are no exception. Humans are just as much a part of the animal kingdom as lions, tigers, bears, rabbits, mice, and worms alike.
Tomorrow will never be the same as yesterday, and tomorrow... is today. You can fight and deny it all you want, but factual science dictates that a universal truth exists: Humans are evolving. My impacted wisdom teeth were and are an explicit example of this exact truth. They grew in funky and wrong because human reproduction favored a slightly smaller jaw than our ancestors, and the trend stood to the point of our mouths eventually becoming too small to hold the same number of teeth as what was once the average. Having thirty-two teeth was at some point more normal than having blonde hair. Now, humans have an average of twenty-eight teeth, and whether you were born without the gene that develops your third molars later in life, or if you've been forced to have them removed because they were present and unsustainable, that statistic applies to you.
Now, according to the google results i've just looked at, a "normal" adult mouth does have 32 teeth, but also nearly %85 of adults have had their wisdom teeth removed. I find it interesting that despite the fact that the majority of adults do not have third molars, we still consider having all four "normal."
Truths change too. Evolution is just a fancy term humans coined to describe the way living things in general change over time, but everything is constantly changing. Technology evolves--much more rapidly that organic things do, by our standards. Landscapes evolve and the ecosystems they harbor also change, and the planes has a yet unmatched ability to adapt and change with the times. When a desert grows where greenery once was, new and different species of plants and animals take the place of what could no longer be sustained in the area. One could truthfully say than nothing ever ends, things only change.
Above in this post, i used the phrasing "my relationship with my wisdom teeth needed to end." This stands true, but i could also just as truthfully have said that "my relationship with my wisdom teeth needed to change drastically," and it did. Now, i strongly believe that humans relationship with the food we eat must change drastically, or otherwise, must end.
Much like my former relationship with my wisdom teeth, we humans want desperately to keep eating meat all the time. We believe we need it, we believe it's right and good and that it will sustain us. But the truth is, it's making us sick. Where wisdom teeth once grew in more or less unnoticed, largely unaddressed, where they once had a healthy amount of room to erupt and become functional molars, there is now limited space, inflamed gums, and a secret harbor for bacteria, a hole in the bucket so to speak. Carnism was once truly a necessity for our development. According to paleo-anthropologists, when hominids (pre-human humanoids) started to eat meat, they were getting a lot more energy from a lot less digestive work. The nutrients and resources the rest of our bodies needed were plentiful, and the surplus is what allowed us to grow much larger brains, which use significantly more energy than any other muscle of equal size.
It makes sense to me. Our brains literally use electricity to communicate with themselves, sending signals between neurons and then to other parts of the body. We really needed that surplus of nutritional energy in order to grow our intelligence--which, by the way, was happening at the same time. The mark in paleontology that indicates to us that humans were eating meat is when cutting marks started appearing on bones: The use of tools. Then soon thereafter, cooking happened. We were already getting smarted when we started eating meat, and meat simply helped it along significantly.
I tend to compare human evolution to the development of individual humans. In this, i estimate humans as a species are equivalent to about an eight to ten year old. As far as millennia go, we're literally barely two. Humans have a lot to learn, and a lot of growing to do. I don't even think our physical parameters are what they will be one day. For example, we already grow a number of organs we consider vestigial for their lack of functionality in the body, but we still have these organs as remnants of organs we did used to use earlier in our evolution. The appendix is a common and well known example; i've read and heard that we use it as a space for a reserve of bacteria in our digestive systems which come into play when we are ill or faced with a dietary threat. Based on what i know about human evolution in it's early stages, it also calculates in my worldview that our guts used to be just bigger so that we could more easily digest plant materials and raw foods, much like how cows eat nothing but grass, corn, or barley, and have four stomachs.
Meat was the milk of human evolution. After we give birth, we produce milk to help sustain our babies and to make them grow bigger and stronger faster. It's the magic food that we eat before we can eat anything else, and it has literally everything we need in it right off the bat. Humans needed denser nutrition with more usable components in order for us to develop our brains, and therefore our language, and our social structure. We needed the milk when we were born. But now, we're more that two millennia old. Even if you count millennia like regular developmental years, here's what a two year old looks like:
Have you ever seen a child that size, a child that can walk, and possibly say a few coherent words, suckling at their mother breast? I most certainly have not. Beyond that, if you see it like i do, we've developed the ability to read and write as sustained evidence of our language, and we have habits and systems in place that we're convinced we really understand, which makes me thing we're an eight to ten year old, and have you EVER seen a kid that age suckling milk? Outliers exist, of course, but it's highly unusual and socially kind of disgusting to see that.
So why are we still eating meat? Because we like it. I'm sure babies like drinking milk too. It's comfortable to be coddles and held to a warm body with a familiar smell and heartbeat. It tastes good because it has everything we need in it. And it's familiar. We've always drank milk, so we're gonna keep drinking milk, right?
Fortunately for mothers, they have autonomy and decide for their selves whether or not to breastfeed their babies. They make a lot of decisions on their babies behalf, considering the limitations of the autonomy of infanthood. Unfortunately for our planet, we never developed a way to communicate directly with it, we just take from it, and keep taking and taking and there is no end in sight to this habit. In addition, our perpetual habit of eating meat is not quite as simple as breastfeeding. Breastfeeding provides sustenance and encourages growth, and happens naturally without terribly much conscious effort. Postpartum people naturally produce milk, especially for as long as they keep breastfeeding. Our planet functions on cycles, around the sun, rotating, changing seasons, species evolve and then go extinct, and it all happens naturally.
We humans, however, have been specifically manipulating the ecosystem for as long as we have been able to. We're disrupting the natural cycle of time, and of life on our planet. The greenhouse gasses cows alone produce makes up around two-thirds of the harmful pollutants that are causing our atmosphere to change in a way that hurts us. I mentioned the cough i developed earlier when i still had my wisdom teeth. I'm also a sufferer of asthma, and this cough i got from being generally sick from having my wisdom teeth persisted long after i had the teeth removed, and even actually began to inflame my asthma to the degree that i was waking every night for some time just to cough, and the cough would further inflame the asthma which would make me wheeze and shorten my breath. I eventually had to go to a doctor for a course of literal steroids so that i could heal my own lungs and breathe normally again; pollution is at least half to blame.
Every scrap of evidence we've collected leads to the same conclusion: Our current lifestyle is unsustainable. We need to, at the very least, cut back on meat and animal product consumption. We have no choice but to turn our attention to the results of our actions, and if we want a tomorrow with us in it, life as we know it must end. We need to change the way we eat.
Veganism is not for everyone. I strongly recommend that you simply pay attention to what you eat and how it makes you feel. Experiment with which foods make you feel best, and which make you feel worse. I can almost guarantee you, you will notice a pattern. Research shows that dairy contributes to difficulty with allergies, and influences the sinus system. What was once called "king's disease" when kings were the ones eating the very most meat and dairy, is now called diabetes, and many people in modern times will develop type-II diabetes, which develops later in life, and guess what... it's attributed to poor diet. Fatty, sugary, dairy-rich foods hurt us. It's just the truth.
Being uncomfortable is a symptom of change. Much like teething, making difficult and uncomfortable decisions is a major growing pain, but it's just that. Growing pains. Humans are already changing and nothing can stop it. We can deny the truth and fight to the death to keep the things we like, but no matter how hard we fight, it won't change the truth.
https://www.quora.com/Will-the-world-be-ok
https://youtu.be/ao2GL3NAWQU
http://www.npr.org/2010/08/02/128849908/food-for-thought-meat-based-diet-made-us-smarter
I don't normally cite because i literally find all my research by googling my questions, and often the answer is just on the results page, but these particular sources are ones i found worth sharing. I also used pictures in this post which i found on google. Look at me go, bein an autodidact and shee-it. Fun fact: You can be an autodidact too. The world is currently at your fingertips. Don't know what an autodidact is? Look it up. ;) Happy healing.
I genetically inherited impacted wisdom teeth. Just two of them. We found out about this when i was around maybe fourteen? I'm not certain, but i've known for years that i had impacted wisdom teeth. I've learned that our family dentist saw the position my teeth were in and his prognosis was to wait until they were closer to the surface to have them removed, considering the expense difference between surgical extraction of embedded teeth versus dental extraction of erupted teeth. So we waited, i was sixteen and still had no wisdom teeth. I was eighteen and still living at home, and still had no wisdom teeth. And then i was twenty, out of the house, working for my own income, and my parents had claimed me as a dependent on their taxes for the last time. My wisdom teeth appeared. It was uncomfortable from the start. Then they first started growing in and cutting my gums, the soft tissue was swollen and my constantly gnashing on it was far from helpful, but my resting closed jaw put moderate pressure on my already inflamed gums. It stayed that way until they were fully erupted, at which point the discomfort was generally reserved for when i was eating, and occasionally if i moved my jaw the wrong way.
Now, if you're unfamiliar, erupted impacted wisdom teeth look kinda like this:
This is hugely problematic, not only due to the discomfort it causes, but also because impacted wisdom teeth are nearly impossible to keep properly clean. It is possible, but would require rigorous, frequent, and painful maintenance multiple times a day. That's no way to live a life. As a result, impacted wisdom teeth, when left ill-attended for obvious reasons, are seriously prone to cavities and tooth decay which is literally impossible for a dentist to address in the position the teeth are in, as well as what happened in my case.
I wanted so badly to keep my wisdom teeth. I want to learn and know as much as i possibly can and they're called wisdom teeth. My experience of teething as an adult shed quite a bit of light on the reason we call them this. I was so excited when they first started cutting my gums and peeking out into the open world. It was painful and uncomfortable for sure, but i was hitting a major landmark in the development of humans into adulthood. I felt that the coming period of time would hold major realizations, healing from my many other ailments, physical and emotional, and a wisening up that can only be achieved by teething as an adult. I also felt incredibly sentimental about them. I already grew all my other teeth and had been using them for years, they were familiar. But these new teeth made me feel like a grandma does each time a new grandchild is born. The newest ones are the littlest, the most precious. My new wisdom teeth made me a more advanced human, especially considering i was born with all four, which is becoming more and more rare. I wanted them. Once they were mostly erupted, i actively used them for chewing. I looked at them and took care of them often. I was flossing and rinsing daily, and specifically used the pick on my flossers to clean underneath the gum flap that covered about a third of each of my bottom wisdom teeth.
I knew i couldn't keep them. Years--nay, decades of experience and research dictated that impacted wisdom teeth are unsustainable. I knew this and fought it anyway. Another reason i was so reluctant to have them removed, of course, was the cost. I didn't know how much it might end up being, but i knew it wasn't covered by all insurances, and i knew it was gonna be a lot out of pocket. Eventually this became my only justification. My dental hygiene regime became cumbersome to me--and the very worst part was when i started getting sick.
No matter how hard i tried, how clean i got my third molars every day, the simple fact of the matter was that the perpetual inflammation was putting a significant strain on my entire immune system. I can't even remember exactly when i first started getting sick, because it was so inconspicuously insidious. Maybe at first it was just a little fatigue. I was eating less often because chewing was uncomfortable. Then there was the emotional exhaustion. Literally everything just took such a toll on me, i was still working, but just barely. I showed up for every shift to take orders and make drinks, but i was hardly there. At some point, my whole body just started aching. I started getting massages in this period of time in attempts to feel better, but it was never long before i felt more sore than before i got the last massage, and it always felt like it was too soon. Then, i think, the cough. That was the last thing that came up, and i don't really remember when it came either, probably because i was so absent from myself. My body was a remotely inhospitable place for my life. I even actually got so depressed that my boss checked on me, and then after i started to feel better again he told me he was thinking of letting me go before my most recent attitude shift.
Now, there were a couple of other circumstances that contributed to my suffering, but all were self-inflicted, and the wisdom teeth were the major highlight of them. Fortunately my situation never became quite extreme, but i still went to greater measures than i believe most people would to keep these entities that were slowly draining the life out of me. I had them removed on the first of this month.
Now, weeks later, i am considerably happier and healthier. I still am in possession of the physical teeth, but two things needed to end lest i fall victim to the very worst i am capable of inflicting on myself. I needed to end my relationship with my wisdom teeth, and i needed to let go of the money it would take to have them removed. I was pretty uncomfortable, before, and especially right after the procedure. It was the dark before the dawn, and it is always darkest before the dawn. Things often have to get worse before they can get better. And i still have my wisdom teeth. I have virtually no use for them other than the satisfaction i feel from knowing i still have them. I still have a current relationship with my wisdom teeth, just now there is a much greater distance between us, and our relationship is infinitely healthier. I can thrive again now that i've let go of them.
Odds are you've heard the word "unsustainable" at some point in your life, if it isn't something you see regularly or often lately. There is a plethora of examples i could use, but i think the one most personal to me that i'll choose to use in this post for today is carnism. Sorry, not sorry, this is my blog and i'm vegan so i'm about to preach. If you don't wanna see it, stop reading now.
Carnism predates history. Many and most people would agree that carnism is an integral aspect of humanity. A vast and diverse number of non-human animals are carnivores and eat nothing but meat. Eating meat is normal, and even as a vegan i would say healthy--in moderation. We have teeth that are evolved for the purpose of cutting and tearing fleshy substances, and hybrid molars for grinding up not just any material, but tough, sinewy meat. Our digestive systems assimilate meat into our bodies in a way that can sustain us for days without eating again, depending on the quantity of meat consumed. There is even a particular kind of protein in animal meat that many dietary consultants and nutritionists consider necessary for a balanced healthy diet. I don't believe in positives and negatives as an existentialist-leaning philosopher, so i won't tell you you're wrong or evil for eating meat, especially because i don't think that at all.
However, evolution is constantly changing us. No child has EVER been identical to either of their parents. This is something we can easily observe, and is a verifiable fact. We can even prove that evolution exists based on researched information gathered from the study of an eclipse of moths (i'm a fan of using accurate terms for groups of animals, they're always so fun). Humans have a tendency to convince ourselves and one another that we've somehow "won" evolution, that it doesn't apply to us. The truth is, we are no exception. Humans are just as much a part of the animal kingdom as lions, tigers, bears, rabbits, mice, and worms alike.
Tomorrow will never be the same as yesterday, and tomorrow... is today. You can fight and deny it all you want, but factual science dictates that a universal truth exists: Humans are evolving. My impacted wisdom teeth were and are an explicit example of this exact truth. They grew in funky and wrong because human reproduction favored a slightly smaller jaw than our ancestors, and the trend stood to the point of our mouths eventually becoming too small to hold the same number of teeth as what was once the average. Having thirty-two teeth was at some point more normal than having blonde hair. Now, humans have an average of twenty-eight teeth, and whether you were born without the gene that develops your third molars later in life, or if you've been forced to have them removed because they were present and unsustainable, that statistic applies to you.
Now, according to the google results i've just looked at, a "normal" adult mouth does have 32 teeth, but also nearly %85 of adults have had their wisdom teeth removed. I find it interesting that despite the fact that the majority of adults do not have third molars, we still consider having all four "normal."
Truths change too. Evolution is just a fancy term humans coined to describe the way living things in general change over time, but everything is constantly changing. Technology evolves--much more rapidly that organic things do, by our standards. Landscapes evolve and the ecosystems they harbor also change, and the planes has a yet unmatched ability to adapt and change with the times. When a desert grows where greenery once was, new and different species of plants and animals take the place of what could no longer be sustained in the area. One could truthfully say than nothing ever ends, things only change.
Above in this post, i used the phrasing "my relationship with my wisdom teeth needed to end." This stands true, but i could also just as truthfully have said that "my relationship with my wisdom teeth needed to change drastically," and it did. Now, i strongly believe that humans relationship with the food we eat must change drastically, or otherwise, must end.
Much like my former relationship with my wisdom teeth, we humans want desperately to keep eating meat all the time. We believe we need it, we believe it's right and good and that it will sustain us. But the truth is, it's making us sick. Where wisdom teeth once grew in more or less unnoticed, largely unaddressed, where they once had a healthy amount of room to erupt and become functional molars, there is now limited space, inflamed gums, and a secret harbor for bacteria, a hole in the bucket so to speak. Carnism was once truly a necessity for our development. According to paleo-anthropologists, when hominids (pre-human humanoids) started to eat meat, they were getting a lot more energy from a lot less digestive work. The nutrients and resources the rest of our bodies needed were plentiful, and the surplus is what allowed us to grow much larger brains, which use significantly more energy than any other muscle of equal size.
It makes sense to me. Our brains literally use electricity to communicate with themselves, sending signals between neurons and then to other parts of the body. We really needed that surplus of nutritional energy in order to grow our intelligence--which, by the way, was happening at the same time. The mark in paleontology that indicates to us that humans were eating meat is when cutting marks started appearing on bones: The use of tools. Then soon thereafter, cooking happened. We were already getting smarted when we started eating meat, and meat simply helped it along significantly.
I tend to compare human evolution to the development of individual humans. In this, i estimate humans as a species are equivalent to about an eight to ten year old. As far as millennia go, we're literally barely two. Humans have a lot to learn, and a lot of growing to do. I don't even think our physical parameters are what they will be one day. For example, we already grow a number of organs we consider vestigial for their lack of functionality in the body, but we still have these organs as remnants of organs we did used to use earlier in our evolution. The appendix is a common and well known example; i've read and heard that we use it as a space for a reserve of bacteria in our digestive systems which come into play when we are ill or faced with a dietary threat. Based on what i know about human evolution in it's early stages, it also calculates in my worldview that our guts used to be just bigger so that we could more easily digest plant materials and raw foods, much like how cows eat nothing but grass, corn, or barley, and have four stomachs.
Meat was the milk of human evolution. After we give birth, we produce milk to help sustain our babies and to make them grow bigger and stronger faster. It's the magic food that we eat before we can eat anything else, and it has literally everything we need in it right off the bat. Humans needed denser nutrition with more usable components in order for us to develop our brains, and therefore our language, and our social structure. We needed the milk when we were born. But now, we're more that two millennia old. Even if you count millennia like regular developmental years, here's what a two year old looks like:
Have you ever seen a child that size, a child that can walk, and possibly say a few coherent words, suckling at their mother breast? I most certainly have not. Beyond that, if you see it like i do, we've developed the ability to read and write as sustained evidence of our language, and we have habits and systems in place that we're convinced we really understand, which makes me thing we're an eight to ten year old, and have you EVER seen a kid that age suckling milk? Outliers exist, of course, but it's highly unusual and socially kind of disgusting to see that.
So why are we still eating meat? Because we like it. I'm sure babies like drinking milk too. It's comfortable to be coddles and held to a warm body with a familiar smell and heartbeat. It tastes good because it has everything we need in it. And it's familiar. We've always drank milk, so we're gonna keep drinking milk, right?
Fortunately for mothers, they have autonomy and decide for their selves whether or not to breastfeed their babies. They make a lot of decisions on their babies behalf, considering the limitations of the autonomy of infanthood. Unfortunately for our planet, we never developed a way to communicate directly with it, we just take from it, and keep taking and taking and there is no end in sight to this habit. In addition, our perpetual habit of eating meat is not quite as simple as breastfeeding. Breastfeeding provides sustenance and encourages growth, and happens naturally without terribly much conscious effort. Postpartum people naturally produce milk, especially for as long as they keep breastfeeding. Our planet functions on cycles, around the sun, rotating, changing seasons, species evolve and then go extinct, and it all happens naturally.
We humans, however, have been specifically manipulating the ecosystem for as long as we have been able to. We're disrupting the natural cycle of time, and of life on our planet. The greenhouse gasses cows alone produce makes up around two-thirds of the harmful pollutants that are causing our atmosphere to change in a way that hurts us. I mentioned the cough i developed earlier when i still had my wisdom teeth. I'm also a sufferer of asthma, and this cough i got from being generally sick from having my wisdom teeth persisted long after i had the teeth removed, and even actually began to inflame my asthma to the degree that i was waking every night for some time just to cough, and the cough would further inflame the asthma which would make me wheeze and shorten my breath. I eventually had to go to a doctor for a course of literal steroids so that i could heal my own lungs and breathe normally again; pollution is at least half to blame.
Every scrap of evidence we've collected leads to the same conclusion: Our current lifestyle is unsustainable. We need to, at the very least, cut back on meat and animal product consumption. We have no choice but to turn our attention to the results of our actions, and if we want a tomorrow with us in it, life as we know it must end. We need to change the way we eat.
Veganism is not for everyone. I strongly recommend that you simply pay attention to what you eat and how it makes you feel. Experiment with which foods make you feel best, and which make you feel worse. I can almost guarantee you, you will notice a pattern. Research shows that dairy contributes to difficulty with allergies, and influences the sinus system. What was once called "king's disease" when kings were the ones eating the very most meat and dairy, is now called diabetes, and many people in modern times will develop type-II diabetes, which develops later in life, and guess what... it's attributed to poor diet. Fatty, sugary, dairy-rich foods hurt us. It's just the truth.
Being uncomfortable is a symptom of change. Much like teething, making difficult and uncomfortable decisions is a major growing pain, but it's just that. Growing pains. Humans are already changing and nothing can stop it. We can deny the truth and fight to the death to keep the things we like, but no matter how hard we fight, it won't change the truth.
https://www.quora.com/Will-the-world-be-ok
https://youtu.be/ao2GL3NAWQU
http://www.npr.org/2010/08/02/128849908/food-for-thought-meat-based-diet-made-us-smarter
I don't normally cite because i literally find all my research by googling my questions, and often the answer is just on the results page, but these particular sources are ones i found worth sharing. I also used pictures in this post which i found on google. Look at me go, bein an autodidact and shee-it. Fun fact: You can be an autodidact too. The world is currently at your fingertips. Don't know what an autodidact is? Look it up. ;) Happy healing.
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