Imagine your life is over. After death, you’re given a chance to watch it all over again—from your first breath to your last. But this time, you don’t just see what you did—you see what it meant. You watch the ripple effect of every decision, the lives you impacted, and how you shaped the world. 

As the reel unspools, you find yourself studying not the grand moments, but the ordinary ones—the quiet habits that revealed your character. What guided those choices? Did your actions match the values you claimed to hold?

Then, perhaps, something unexpected begins to stand out as you watch the impact of your decisions unfold: the food you ate. Did you ever include that daily choice in your moral accounting? Did your meals reflect the compassion you believed yourself to have—or did rationalizations silence your conscience? Everyone does it. I’ve always done it. I need to. It’s normal.

We are creatures of ritual. We inherit our appetites as we inherit our language. We don’t question our dinner any more than our grammar. We grow up believing certain animals are food and others are family, and that this division requires no defense beyond custom. Culture does the heavy lifting; conscience adapts. 

But every so often, the illusion cracks. A truck full of livestock passes on the highway. A slaughterhouse video surfaces before we can scroll away. We tell ourselves it’s “just the way things are.” What we mean is: I’d rather not think about it. Then someone close to us—a friend, a sibling—announces they’ve stopped eating animals. For an instant, we feel the tremor of recognition that they are doing something right. Then habit reasserts itself, and we begin reciting our registry of reasons why it’s not for us. We must shut down the thought before it convinces us.

The truth is hard to look at because it has been made invisible. The killing is outsourced, professionalized, and hidden behind packaging and euphemism. We’re told our choices are personal, but their consequences are anything but. Behind every meal is a vast machinery of suffering and destruction we’ve trained ourselves not to see. We no longer eat animals—we eat “meat,” “products,” “protein.” The living being disappears into the language before it disappears from the plate.

Yet what we cannot see still exists. The average American consumes dozens of animals a year—creatures who lived short, engineered lives in conditions that would qualify as cruelty under any other circumstance. They feel pain, form bonds, and fear death. We know this. We’ve always known it. Our decision to ignore it is not innocence; it is convenience.

For most of human history, meat was a matter of survival. Today, it’s an indulgence subsidized by suffering. We no longer eat animals because we must; we do it because we can. That is not survival—it is apathy. A habit masquerading as need.

To question this practice is not extremism. It follows the same moral logic that has guided every leap forward in our collective conscience. When change threatens comfort, it’s instinctive to label it “radical.” But doing so doesn’t change its merits—it only protects our habits. We dismiss those who refuse to participate not because they’re wrong, but because they remind us we could do better.

We justify our decisions with the language of nature—the food chain, the circle of life—as if industrial agriculture were an ecosystem rather than a factory. There is nothing natural about rows of animals who never see the sun, or about the assembly lines that turn bodies into inventory. We’ve mechanized life itself—and then told ourselves it’s tradition.

Still, the problem isn’t only ethical—it’s existential. The machinery that feeds us is also poisoning the planet that sustains us. Forests fall for pasture. Rivers choke on waste. The atmosphere fills with the cost of our appetites. The boundary between moral harm and material harm has vanished; the same indifference that consumes lives also consumes the world.

Someday, perhaps, people will look back at this era with the same disbelief we reserve for the cruelties of the past. They’ll wonder how otherwise decent people convinced themselves that empathy was optional and comfort outweighed compassion. The real question isn’t whether animals have souls. It’s whether we do.

Every meal is a referendum on what we value—on whether temporary pleasure justifies immense suffering, on how far our empathy extends before convenience draws the line. The answers are not comfortable, but they are waiting for us every time we sit down to eat.

Change begins with attention. That brief, uneasy hesitation before a choice is the voice of conscience. When it insists that change is impossible, pause and ask the question that matters most: Am I willing to let animals suffer for my convenience, or will I live in a way that reflects the kindness and thoughtfulness I value?

The tragedy is not only that animals suffer and die for our comfort, but that we have learned to live comfortably with that knowledge. The good news is that turning away from that harm has never been easier—or more urgent—for the animals, our health, and the planet.

And perhaps, when our life reaches its end, if we watched it unfold again, we would see those small moments of conscience differently. The times we paused before acting, questioned what was easy, and chose what was right will stand out as turning points—not sacrifices, but awakenings.

If we begin to make better choices about what we eat now, we may one day look back and see not just a life of appetite, but a life of compassion—a life that, when replayed, feels a little more worthy of having been lived.

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Andrew Kirschner is the founder of Epic Walking Tours in New York City.