Mine is retail work. Yeah I get it. You hate it. There isn’t anything that I hadn’t heard before about it by now that hasn’t already been said. Yup, people suck.
But on the same token, I don’t really appreciate the level people go to, to dissuade people from getting into retail work. Job is a job and income is income. You’ll need both of these things. I’ve learned that a lot of the time, people just happen to be employed by shitty stores that are managed by power-tripping people or maybe the team they work with are annoyingly incompetent.
Yet if you manage to find a store that’s worth working in, it’s worth it for however long you want to be there for. I chose to work for retail. I don’t mind the labor. I don’t want a sit-down desk job.
And yeah I work for a big company that has questionable values and has destroyed communities. But that’s really out of my control and because that I work for said company, does not necessarily mean that I agree with it or side with the corporate standards. If I wanted to, I’d go back to school and find something else to do.
And that’s what I advise people to do if they’re so tired of their retail job. Go back to school, it’s really all you can do other than go to trade school to get skills and branch into different careers. Just bitching about it all day is not going to do a thing. I used to be like that but all it does was just make me hate everything and there were a couple points where I could’ve gotten fired over it. It’s not worth getting fired over something you don’t really have an investment in.
Regardless of pain perception: Assuming someone is okay with killing a fruit fly but not a human, they have to draw the line somewhere. And a pig for example is WAY closer to human than to a fruit fly. It’s a sentient being with a brain that’s not really so far from human, compared to the fruit fly which is essentially a tiny biological robot.
In fact, it’s kinda weird to draw the line at humans, especially when there’s such a big overlap between other animals and human children in terms of cognitive capabilities.
I think it’s very reasonable to draw the line after insects, where we can be reasonably certain that there’s no complex thought or sentience. The value and subjective experience of an insect versus a farm animal are hardly comparable.
This, and if you eat vegan, it will also limit the damage done to bugs as a result of smaller land use. I’m vegan with no exceptions, but I don’t really give a fuck about being vegan in some weird absolute way like “can I sit on leather chair at my friends”. Instead of that, veganism is just an attempt to reduce suffering, with full understanding that it is never going to remove it, and that there are other ways to to reduce suffering in the world without being vegan, which I also try to implement in my life.
That’s a fine way of viewing it. I feel like the entire argument is just an attempt at rationalizing one’s indifference to animal suffering (particularly those of farm animals), so iterations of this argument don’t even matter as i doubt many who use this argument would convert if it were proven to be false.
The truth is many meat eaters don’t really care for the suffering of animals that much to stop eating meat which in and of itself could be considered an argument, but that usually results in ad hominem attacks from vegans. I don’t see myself or any other meat eater as actively trying to bring about suffering. It’s just people trying to have a good meal, and killing animals is an unfortunate consequence of that goal.