I hear ignorance is bliss or phrases related to that saying a lot. You’re ignorance might be bliss to you in the moment but it usually isn’t to somebody else. Eventually it stops being bliss for you too.

As a vegan, I often have people tell me “oh don’t tell me about (insert animal product), I don’t want it ruined for me/I want to keep eating it.” There are four topics people who eat animal products should know about but don’t and purposely try to keep it that way. The topics are: how animals in the animal agriculture industry are treated, how animal agriculture negatively impacts people, how animal products are bad for your health, and how animal agriculture is unsustainable and destroying the environment.

Your ignorance is not bliss to the 9 billion farm animals slaughtered in the U.S. every year who spent their entire shortened lives suffering. If they can’t turn away from their own pain, you shouldn’t be able to turn away from it either if you are causing it. Your ignorance isn’t bliss to the people of color who live in North Carolina whose communities are being ruined by the hog farms. Your ignorance is not bliss to the exploited slaughterhouse workers who work in terrible and unhealthy conditions and suffer from PTSD.

Your ignorance won’t  be bliss to you when you suffer from health problems like cancer, heart disease, or diabetes from eating animal products. The whole world as a whole won’t feel bliss when climate change gets worse and we run out of land to keep feeding people animal products.

Yes the weight of this information can take an emotional toll, but the world will never get better if people never snap out of their ignorance. Don’t tell me not to tell you because as Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”