I go to vegan forums occasionally to find quotes, get ideas, and to satisfy my morbid curiosity. The first thread I clicked on today was called “Vegan. Two Years. Awww yeah.” In it, the two-year-strong vegan who created the thread announces to everyone: “I had Buddhist Chinese buffet and chocolate cake with mango gelato in celebration! Best decision of my life.”

I don’t know if he means the vegan Chinese buffet was the best decision of his life, or going vegan was, but it did entertain (and disturb) me to find someone making that kind of proclamation a few days after writing about it.

I’m not sure if I was able to really articulate in that entry why I think that “best decision of my life” is such a weird thing to say about going vegan. One thing that strikes me as funny now is how word-for-word it is. Every time I’ve seen a vegan say that becoming vegan was the best thing they have ever done, it always seems to include the exact wording “best decision of my life.” Why not “I’ve never done anything better than give up all animal products”?

Also interesting to me was the reaction in the forum. Everyone said something like “Congrats!” — treating veganism as a personal accomplishment rather than something done for the benefit of the rest of the world. Shouldn’t they be saying “Thanks!” instead?

I’ve often heard vegans say that going vegan was the best decision they ever made. Something about this comment strikes me as odd. Even though, I guess it makes sense. If you believe that veganism is good for animals, the planet and your own health, that it does no harm and all good, it does seem like a pretty airtight decision.

Still, I used to believe all that, and I don’t think I would have said it was the best decision ever. I wouldn’t even say now that quitting veganism was the best decision I ever made, though I’m fairly confident that it was a better decision than becoming vegan.

But there’s no way to really know what our best decision is. It’s impossible to track the consequences of every choice we make, even with regards to how the decision affects us directly, so something that may seem to us like the best option we could have picked might have actually made our lives much worse.

Also, something feels off about saying that some restriction that you imposed on yourself was the best thing ever. Arguably it’s similar to an alcoholic saying that quitting alcohol was the best decision they ever made. But that makes more sense. A former alcoholic can at least see the obvious benefits in their ability to function again.

Quitting animal products isn’t really like that. The rewards, if they exist at all, are more abstract. Some vegans say they notice major health transformations from quitting animal products (Woody Harrelson cured his acne by weaning off dairy), but many don’t, and some admit noticing immediate health declines.

When they say, “Going vegan is the best decision I ever made,” they don’t just mean for themselves, they mean for the world as a whole - the environment, animals, and starving children. But as I said in a previous entry, something isn’t really an accomplishment if an even better way to achieve it is to commit suicide or never be born. A much more effective solution to heart attacks, carbon footprints and animal exploitation than veganism would be for all of us to kill ourselves. Would that be the best decision we ever made?

Maybe. But probably not.

Curious to see how common it was for vegans to credit animal avoidance as best decision number one, I did a Google search for “best decision I ever made” (in quotes) and vegan. There were 369,000 results.

Alright, for the sake of intellectual honesty, I should say that one of them was a mother saying that having a C-section was the best decision she ever made, another was a poll about whether moving to Charlotte was the best thing you could ever do, and one was a raw foodist saying that not buying a dehydrator was her best decision. So make that 368,997 results.