I didn’t read my way into Stoicism.
I lived my way into it.
For most of my adult life I operated on a set of principles I’d assembled myself.
Control what you can.
Release what you can’t.
Act on your values regardless of who’s watching or what it costs you socially.
I thought this was just how I was built.
Then I found out it had a name.
It had a name for two thousand years.
Let me back up.
Thirty years ago I read a diet book called Fit for Life.
One question in that book made me stop and take notice.
Slightly paraphrasing here, the question was: when you drive by a field with cows in it, do you start salivating thinking there is dinner?
Thinking more on this, I actually asked myself that question.
I found that I didn’t.
This then led me to the next question I had to ask myself: why should an animal have to die so I can claim to live?
That decision sounds clean written down.
Living it was another matter.
Going vegan in the mid-1990s meant explaining yourself constantly.
It meant reading labels in supermarkets that had never heard the word.
It meant family dinners where your plate was a topic.
It meant being the difficult one, the weird one, the one making a fuss.
I had no philosophy to lean on.
No framework.
No community handing me ready-made answers.
What I had was the original logic: the harm is unnecessary, so I won’t participate.
Every social cost got weighed against that one fact. The fact always won.
Looking back, I was running Stoic software without knowing the operating system existed.
The dichotomy of control?
I was practising it at every barbecue.
I couldn’t control what people thought of my choices.
I could control the choices.
So I stopped spending energy on the first thing and put all of it into the second.
Preferred indifferents?
That was every restaurant menu for a decade.
Convenience would have been nice.
It wasn’t available.
Fine.
Convenience was never the point.
Acting according to nature, according to reason?
That was the founding decision itself.
Reason said the killing was unnecessary.
Acting against your own reasoned conclusion is a kind of self-betrayal.
I wasn’t willing to live divided like that.
I did all of this for years before I ever picked up Epictetus.
When I finally did, the experience wasn’t education.
It was recognition.
Page after page of a Greek slave writing two millennia ago, describing the exact mental moves I’d been making at Australian dinner tables.
Some things are up to us.
Some things are not.
I’d been sorting my entire vegan life into those two boxes without knowing the boxes had names.
Marcus Aurelius hit the same way.
Here was the most powerful man alive reminding himself, privately, that other people’s opinions were not his business.
That his job was his own judgement and his own actions.
I’d arrived at the same conclusion from the opposite end of the power spectrum: a bloke in suburban Melbourne who’d decided the room’s opinion of his plate didn’t get a vote.
This is the part of my story I find most useful, and it’s the part the modern Stoic revival tends to skip.
Stoicism wasn’t built by academics.
Zeno was a merchant who lost everything in a shipwreck.
Epictetus was a slave.
Cato was a politician who valued his integrity above his career and paid for it.
Marcus ran an empire through plague and war.
These were people testing their principles against real pressure, in real rooms, with real costs.
That’s why the philosophy fit my experience so precisely.
I’d built my version the same way they built theirs.
Under load.
Against resistance.
One uncomfortable dinner at a time.
The discovery changed something, though.
Practice without philosophy is durable.
Practice with philosophy is articulate.
Before, I could hold the line.
After, I could explain the line, to myself first and others second.
I understood why the social pressure had never moved me: because I’d unconsciously filed it under “not up to me” and stopped feeding it attention.
I understood why the commitment never felt like deprivation: because I’d never confused preferred indifferents with actual goods.
The framework didn’t create the practice.
It explained it.
And an explained practice is easier to keep, easier to teach, and much harder to argue out of.
Which brings me to why this site exists.
Most people who go vegan don’t stay vegan.
The research on recidivism is grim.
The usual culprits aren’t nutritional.
They’re psychological.
Social friction.
Identity fatigue.
The slow erosion that comes from caring about something the people around you treat as optional.
These are precisely the problems Stoicism was engineered to solve.
Not modern pop-Stoicism, the cold-shower-and-grindset version.
The actual philosophy.
A system for holding a reasoned position under social pressure, indefinitely, without burning out or turning bitter.
I held a vegan commitment for ten years on improvised Stoicism and twenty more on the real thing.
I know which decade was hardest.
It was the one where I had the principles without the language.
So that’s what I’m offering here.
The language.
The framework.
The two-thousand-year-old toolkit, applied to the specific pressures of a vegan life.
Not because you need philosophy to be vegan.
I’m proof you don’t.
You need it to be vegan for thirty years without exhausting yourself.
If you’ve ever held a position you knew was right while a room full of people you love treated it as a phase, you’ve already done the hard part.
You’ve already practised.
The philosophy is just the manual that ships late.
It shipped late for me.
It still arrived in time.
Cameron Blewett has been vegan for thirty years. He spent over a decade living by Stoic principles before he found out that’s what they were called.
He writes about food safety, vegan ethics, and the overlap between Stoic philosophy and plant-based living, work that doesn’t fit the modern secular Stoic mould, and isn’t trying to.
Based in Melbourne, Australia, he also writes at CameronBlewett.blog, greybeardedvegan.blog and foodsafety.ist.