It started with a morning coffee in Singapore and a scroll through Instagram DMs. A few days earlier, VegOut had published an article about the research showing vegans have significantly higher rates of depression and anxiety. Pushback from the vegan community was expected. What came next was not.
People who had nothing to do with veganism started reaching out. One person wrote: "I'm not even vegan, but your article made me realize why I've been so miserable since starting CrossFit. I can't admit to my gym friends that I'm burned out because being 'the fitness guy' is all I have left."
Another: "I've been calling myself a minimalist for three years, but I'm secretly drowning in anxiety about whether I own too much. I can't buy anything without feeling like I'm betraying who I am."
And then this one, which was enough to make a person set the phone down entirely: "I left my corporate job to become a 'conscious entrepreneur' and now I'm more trapped than ever. I can't pivot my failing business because everyone knows me as the guy who escaped the rat race. What happens to my identity if I go back?"
Something clicked. This wasn't about veganism at all.
The messages kept coming—dozens of them—from people who'd never touched a plant-based diet but recognized something in the follow-up piece about the psychological cost of living by strict ethical codes. Christians questioning their faith but terrified to lose their community. People who disagreed with their political party's positions but couldn't voice dissent. Parents suffocating under the weight of parenting philosophies they'd adopted as gospel.
What emerged was a picture of the hidden epidemic of our time: a generation of people who've confused temporary alignments with permanent essence, mistaking belief systems for identity itself. And it's quietly destroying them.
Through the work of The Vessel—a platform co-created with Brazilian shaman Rudá Iandê to help people develop authentic self-knowledge—glimpses of this pattern had already surfaced. But it took those Instagram messages to reveal how universal it really is. Society has become full of ideological orphans, desperately adopting belief systems as surrogate families, then defending them with the fierce loyalty of abandoned children.
The mental health crisis among vegans isn't about B12 deficiencies or social pressure. It's about what happens when any beautiful choice becomes a psychological prison. And once you see this pattern, you can't unsee it everywhere.
The collapse of meaning-making structures
We're living through the collapse of traditional meaning-making structures—religion, extended family, stable communities, geographical rootedness. But instead of grieving this loss and building something new, people have been frantically grabbing onto ideologies like life rafts, then clinging to them so tightly they forget they know how to swim.
This plays out countless times: someone makes a genuine, values-driven choice—going plant-based, embracing minimalism, launching a purpose-driven business—and within months, they aren't just someone who made that choice. They are that choice. When complications arise—health issues, practical constraints, changing circumstances—they can't adapt because adaptation feels like self-annihilation. "If I'm not this," they ask themselves, "then who am I?"
That question haunts anyone who has lived through it. Consider someone who leaves a management consulting career to pursue more purpose-driven work, thinking they're choosing freedom. But they've just traded one identity prison for another. They become so invested in being the founder, the person building something meaningful outside the traditional system, that they can't always honestly assess when things aren't working. Admitting failure feels like admitting they're a fraud.
Identity fusion: when beliefs become self
This is what psychologists call "identity fusion"—when the boundary between self and group dissolves, when challenging the belief feels like threatening the self. It creates a kind of anxious attachment where any flexibility feels like existential danger. You can't be wrong about anything significant because being wrong means you might not be who you think you are.
You can see this pattern everywhere once you start looking. The meditation teacher who can't admit she's depressed because spiritual people are supposed to be at peace. The zero-waste advocate who hoards glass jars in secret shame. The productivity guru whose life is chaos but who can't say so without destroying his brand—and his sense of self.
Rudá Iandê has helped many people understand something crucial: most suffering comes not from circumstances, but from rigid identification with temporary states. People think they need to be consistent, to have a solid sense of self. But what if that very solidity is what's strangling them?
Programs like "Out of the Box," co-created with Rudá, reinforce what this pattern reveals: the people who suffer most are often the ones with the strongest moral convictions. They care so much about doing right that they lose touch with what actually serves their wellbeing. They become more committed to the purity of their positions than to the effectiveness of their choices.
How identity fusion fractures our collective problem-solving
This pattern isn't just creating individual misery—it's fracturing our collective ability to solve problems. When
