Getting Better at Feeling Worse

How to violate your instincts and do something that matters for the environment

It’s a surreal time to be a human. We’re trapped on a collision course with global climate disaster, and even though we know the facts, we still can’t take our foot off the gas—literally. Why? The short answer is that our brains are tragically out-of-date.

Despite all of our technological advances, we’re still better suited to the ancient world, whose violent dangers shaped our evolution and defined our core instincts. So, when it comes to the react-or-die processing required to survive in the wild, our minds are fantastically well-adapted. But when a threat unfolds slowly and almost imperceptibly across the entire planet, the otherwise magnificent organ inside our skull simply lacks the programming to respond appropriately.

Still, despite our deeply ingrained prehistoric mindset, we are capable of abstract thought, which at least allows us to comprehend the reality of climate change. This creates a conflict between our theories and our instincts, which in turn leads to a condition that psychologists call cognitive dissonance. Simply put, cognitive dissonance is what happens when our beliefs and behaviours don’t match. In environmental terms, these clashes between our ideas and our actions are our “Green Gaps.” And yeah, they feel terrible.

Since cognitive dissonance is so uncomfortable, humans have all kinds of mental tricks to avoid consciously experiencing it. But we need to let ourselves experience that dissonance, because it’s going to motivate us to actually change our behaviour. “Dissonance is ultimately going to drive us to become better people over time,” says Dan Meegan, a cognitive scientist at the University of Guelph in Ontario.

Here are three subtle things we do to protect ourselves from the truth about our behaviour, and some tips on how to short-circuit our defence mechanisms.

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Avoidance Mechanism

Having a superiority complex.

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Most people overestimate their pro-environmental behaviour, particularly if their neighbours aren’t as conscientious. “I think it’s real easy for people to not experience dissonance at all, as long as they can look around and see an example of a neighbour or a friend who is worse than they are,” explains Meegan.

Fact: Social norms aren’t the standard.

Conforming to group norms is an evolutionary drive. “We evolved in an environment where we were in communities of people, and so the way groups of people have been able to thrive together is by having sets of rules that we all follow,” explains Meegan. But if we use our group norms as a baseline, it’s easy to feel good about ourselves, because most people put very little thought into how their actions contribute to climate change. Since the actions and behaviours of the majority set a very low bar, don’t congratulate yourself for jumping over it.

How to overcome it: Get used to feeling weird.

Society sneers at people who go against the norm to perform pro-environmental behaviours. “We call them snobs. We call them elitists. We have all sorts of negative things to say about people who are doing good things,” says Meegan. The reason? Avoiding cognitive dissonance, of course. “Instead of hating yourself and changing your own behaviour, your first instinct is to hate this person who is doing something that isn’t the norm in our little society.”

You might feel defensive when you get called a “tree hugger,” “granola,” or other pejorative term (want to read something cruel? Look up environmentalist on Urban Dictionary… or don’t), but don’t take the bait. Become an environmentalist, but be humble, be compassionate—remember, we’re all just stuck in survival mode—and do your thing. Social norms really do change, but not unless some people are willing to take a little heat.

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AVOIDANCE MECHANISM

Being bad at math.

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Most of us do some form of mental accounting, where we tally up the good and bad things we do. We then unconsciously “spend” the good actions to justify our environmentally harmful behaviours. Psychologists call it moral licensing. In other words, if you always bring your reusable bags to the grocery store, you can justify buying coffee in a to-go cup once and a while.

Fact: Our good deeds often aren’t that good.

In order to feel free to do what we want, we tend to give a lot of weight to our good deeds, and minimize the bad. “The little trick we play on ourselves is that we make mountains out of mole hills,” says Meegan. “We make it really, really easy to pat ourselves on the back for the little things that we do.” Don’t kid yourself: practicing Earth Hour doesn’t balance the GHG emissions from burning jet fuel to go on holiday.

How to overcome it: Use a calculator. Seriously.

There are calculators that calculate the carbon costs of all the little things we do on a daily basis, like this one by the Nature Conservancy. “Be honest with yourself about the consequence of your actions and quantify those things in an accurate way,” advises Meegan. Of course, if you do the real math, corporations are far more culpable than any individual. You may do the most good by pitching in to social and political movements that strive to hold industries accountable.

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AVOIDANCE MECHANISM

Living in the moment.

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From an evolutionary perspective, today is always a safer bet than tomorrow. Consequently, we have a pretty bad blind spot in the area of long-term thinking. “When your job is to survive long enough to pass on your genes, it’s really a short term type of thing,” explains Meegan. Humans today suffer from what psychologists call temporal discounting: discounting the future relative to the present.

Fact: Nature won’t wait for us to figure it out.

We’re optimistic creatures, but nature doesn’t promise any happy endings. “Through human history, there are all sorts of examples of societies that ended up sabotaging their own survival because they weren’t able to use foresight on a collective level,” says Meegan.

How to overcome it: Automate tough decisions.

Temporal discounting is difficult to overcome on a choice-by-choice basis, but we can outsmart ourselves by removing the need to choose. A good example is saving for retirement. Since we always prefer immediate rewards over distant ones, even if it means suffering later, financial advisors suggest automating savings deposits. While many pro-environmental choices need to be made in the moment, others can be made in advance, during moments of better willpower and smarter thinking. For example, you can take the pressure off of buying cheap industrialized produce at the grocery store by signing up for a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) food box and getting local organic produce delivered to your door.

About a Vegan

Journalist and radio host Matthieu Dugal tells the story of how he became vegan, despite his visceral love for lamb chops.

Quite honestly, I never thought I’d write this. It’s not exactly easy to do given how much people from all walks of life judge this lifestyle. I’m clearly not getting any likes, friends, or gratitude for this confession. When I’m done, I promise to never mention it again.

Long story short, about a year ago, my girlfriend started her 21-day vegan challenge. I say ’her,’ because had I started off by saying ‘Okay, I’m doing it with you,’ I would have already been picturing my glorious return to omelettes, rosemary lamb chops, osso buco with extra parsley, tender tilapia, and delicious sausages of all kinds. Because I love meat. I’m crazy about it.

I’m a pretty big fan of fish too. Black cod in a butter sauce? Tuna steak with a balsamic reduction? Thick-cut salmon drowning in lemon juice? Bring it on. And don’t even get me started on cheese. Dates stuffed with blue cheese? Yes, please.

But, hey, if I was going to deprive myself for three weeks, I figured I might as well find out why. I’ll to be completely honest with you (and with her): Even though I really love my girlfriend and I think her online presence is awesome, I’d never tried to understand the reasons behind her veganism. In fact, her posts and persistent enthusiasm used to get on my nerves (just a little, though). Besides, I told myself, we’ve been eating meat for thousands of generations. From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s as normal as it gets. And seriously, we’re at the top of the food chain. We’re predators like a thousand other predators in the animal kingdom. Spare a thought for the suffering of lesser beings? Fuck that. Cage aux Sports!

In other words, I thought vegans were a little over-the-top with their fanatical prohibitions and refusal to enjoy scarfing down good food.

You’ve probably noticed by now that science is one of the main beacons that guides me through my earthly existence. During these three weeks of research, I attempted to approach this lifestyle from a critical point of view and I came to realize a few things. It’s true that certain vegans border on ridiculous; they almost sound like Jesuits telling natives there’s a God far greater than theirs that they need to welcome into their hearts. Apart from that, though, veganism makes a lot more sense than a meat-based diet. By one hell of a wide margin.

Strictly from a thermodynamic point of view, eating meat is a bit as though we were still heating our homes with coal. The amount of energy and water we need to produce a kilo of meat, milk, or butter is simply unsustainable if we want to be able to keep feeding the 10 billion people who will soon inhabit the earth. There are 70 billion livestock in the world. The food, fertilizer, and medication we give them, and the shit they produce, amounts to an environmental catastrophe of the same order of magnitude as Trump insisting on opening oil drilling areas like they’re McDonald’s franchises. River and ocean dead zones, created by industrial agriculture’s heavy use of fertilizers (mainly to feed livestock), are suffocating even the hardiest ecosystems.

If everyone avoided eating meat, the number of farms required to feed everyone would be 20 times lower, and we know for a fact that we need more forests.

And that’s not even counting overfishing: More and more studies show that we’re progressively, and literally, emptying the oceans of all life. For a kilo of fish caught, we kill five kilos of marine biomass. According to many experts, unless you only catch two or three trout once in a while in a lake in the Laurentians, the concept of responsible fishing is a bunch of greenwashing bullshit.

Since Darwin, we’ve also come to understand that we’re only one branch of the evolution of life on earth, and what we thought was exclusive to us, consciousness, is probably pretty common. Neuroscience is unequivocal: Our industrial livestock have consciousness and they suffer. So, on the highway, when I come across a truck full of pigs on their way to the slaughterhouse, when it’s rainy and cold, I figure they’re aware of their painful lives. I’m not being sentimental; it’s scientifically proven. Whether you eat meat or not, it’s something you need to know.

Organic meat, cows in the fields, free-range chickens? That’s great. But the quantity of land required to meet our collective needs is simply impossible to reach. Like many experts, I came to the conclusion that the meat industry is scientifically and environmentally unsustainable.

Do we really need meat and milk and fish to survive? No way. It’s far from essential. Is veganism within everyone’s reach? For a bunch of reasons—health, accessibility—no. I’m lucky enough to have a decent income (but seriously, meat is hella expensive) and live where vegan options are pretty much available everywhere. I chose not to have children, so I don’t need to deal with pressure from their school or friends.

I’m also lucky to love food—all of it (in fact, apart from bananas and goddamn parsnips, I’ll eat pretty much anything). I’m lucky to have an incredible girlfriend with whom I enjoy cooking real gourmet food, not just tasteless substitutes for food I actually like.

We already know that collectively, we don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables. Our populations have fibre deficiencies, and that causes a bunch of health problems that are too long to list here. Can we live better by avoiding eating meat? We sure can.

It happens rather frequently that during a shoot, I’ll have to eat out with the team. Am I going to cause a fuss? No. If you invite me over, I’ll probably grab a slice of your dry sausage before dinner. And I still eat oysters (until proven otherwise, oysters have no consciousness and farming them doesn’t endanger the oceans). Do I feel righteous? No way. I’m as full of contradictions as the next person. But I own up to them, and I’m open to discussing them.

I’d really like to thank Marianne, my wonderful girlfriend, who helped me realize all this by initiating this change, which isn’t nearly as hard as it looks.

Is my choice a way of condemning my colleagues and friends who do things differently? Not at all. I’m not going to speak out against something I did for decades.

You can judge me quietly, or not. But I hope you’re still going to talk to me. I’m still going to laugh at vegan jokes (a lot of them are really funny). I love you all. I wish you a great year, no matter who and where you are.

And thank God beer is vegan.

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Matthieu Dugal has been a journalist, radio host, and columnist for the past 20 years. He’s contributed to Le Devoir, La Presse, Voir, and ICI Radio-Canada Première, where he hosts a show called Moteur de recherche, which covers science, the environment, health, and technology.

We are perfect*

“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces,
I would plant my apple tree.”
— Martin Luther

In this unique amalgam of stories about how we fail to honour the earth that hosts us with appropriate etiquette, I actually hear a tenor of hope. It’s a community of people saying, “This is how I wish I behaved, but this is how my lizard brain reacts instead.”

Social media marketers figured this out a long time ago. They know that the loftier our ambitious humanistic aspirations, the more susceptible we are to falling for the easy and comfortable options scrolling down our screens: autoplays of cat videos on Facebook, ready-to-cook dinner delivery services, a one-click purchasable juicer on Amazon that inspires us to buy more fruit than we’d normally ever consume, only to watch it go bad on our countertop.

We’re hard-wired to operate within a system that, by design, lures us into making choices that are damaging to both our health and our environment.

But that’s no reason to bang our heads against the wall. We might feel helpless at the fact that the planet is heating up, we might disappoint ourselves from time to time, but we must also recognize and acknowledge our strong desire for change and our astounding track record for reaching new social and environmental milestones. As climate change journalist and creator of the now defunct New York Times’ Dot Earth blog states:

The more we visualize our immediate impact on the environment — how we pollute our air, how our stuff is made, the shelf life of our most common goods — the harder our discomfort will be to silence. And switching to more environmentally friendly choices won’t be a luxury anymore, it will be a necessity. After all, necessity is the mother of invention.

This feeling of urgency has already begun to inspire scientists, entrepreneurs, and citizens alike to make bold and creative changes in their lives: the fisherman who has adopted sustainable ocean farming methods, the entrepreneur who uses beekeeping as a tool to unite communities, the ecotourism-funded biologist dreaming up ways to save coral in the South Pacific Ocean. These people are committing their lives to bringing us choices that allow us to have a positive impact on the world. These are the stories we should hear more of: stories of the glass half full.

In order to feel this urgency in our daily lives, it’s been proven that positive peer pressure can actually help bring about motivation. If, for example, you saw a poster on the subway stating: “90 per cent of people in your neighbourhood are actively composting and therefore cutting their waste production by half,” chances are you’d get your hands on a bin yourself and start filling it right away. Call it FOMO, call it our competitive side: there is no wrong way to inspire positive action.

In the end, radical change on a large scale isn’t going to happen by shifting the blame around. It’s going to happen by voicing our discomfort, demanding to be presented with better choices, and holding ourselves and each other accountable for the stewardship of our planet, so that gradually, acting in favour of the environment becomes effortless. And our lizard brains can fool us no longer.

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*The title of Andrew Revkin’s TED Talk on our behaviours and climate change.

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