The Vegan Dystopia: Understanding the Psychosocial Experience of Vystopia

Representing Possible Worlds

The ability to imagine alternative futures and engage in counterfactual thinking is thought to be a uniquely human trait (Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007). This imaginative capacity is often seen as adaptive, underpinning our sense of morality, justice, and motivation for social change (Fernando et al., 2020; Mannheim, 1991). While often applied to interpersonal ethics, this same ability can be used to evaluate society as a whole. At a systemic level, people can envision worlds that are either morally ideal (utopias) or morally degraded (dystopias) relative to current norms. Such thinking provides a critical lens through which we assess the contemporary moral environment.

Common usage in the arts often creates temporal distance between the current state of affairs and the dystopian counterfactual. Yet, utopian and dystopian thinking may not only apply as distant future alternatives but are often used to describe current society (as dystopian) relative to an ideal (a utopia). In his speech to the British parliament, English philosopher John Stuart Mill (Mill, n.d.) coined the term “dystopia”. He used it as an antonym of utopia to imply that the current political situation was an undesirable state of affairs, relative to his own political ideals.

Since the term’s origin, it has inspired a great deal of literature depicting dystopian worlds. Some popular examples include: A Handmaid's Tale (Atwood, 1985) and Nineteen-eighty four (Orwell, 1949). These classic texts often cover storylines of oppression, technologically enabled authoritarianism, environmental catastrophe, and the suppression of individuality. Such recurring themes suggest that dystopian literature may reflect fundamental psychological patterns, as proposed by psychoanalytic theorists (Vandermeersch, 2001). Thus, we might expect dystopian thought to attract attention in contemporary cognitive research.

Indeed, early empirical work on the psychological functions of imagined alternative societies has found that dystopias are perceived as psychologically closer than utopias. This effect was particularly strong in low-system justifiers, namely political liberals (Panayiotou, 2020). The role of system justification supports the idea that dystopian thoughts are more readily available when people are not satisfied with the current state of affairs. As proposed by Badaan et al. (2020), this makes dystopian thought a potential catalyst for inspiring social change. Indeed, Daysh et al., (2024) found that both utopian and dystopian thinking motivated pro-environmental collective action but via different emotional pathways - utopian thinking increased collective action intentions by inducing hope whereas dystopian thinking does so by inducing fear.

Though dystopian thinking may bolster prosocial intentions and behaviours, this is not without personal cost. Being immersed in dystopian realities by fearing both the current and future possible states of the world, such as anthropogenic climate change, has been found to be strongly associated with significant challenges such as depression, anxiety, stress, insomnia, lower self-referred mental health, and reluctance to have children (Boluda-Verdu et al., 2022; Ogunbode et al., 2023). Given these potential consequences, it is crucial to better understand those immersed in dystopian thought. Understanding these experiences has implications for ethically driven groups such as environmentalists, AI pessimists, and animal rights activists. These groups offer us a unique opportunity to study the psychological antecedents and consequences of dystopian worldviews as lived experiences rather than mere abstract concepts.

Vystopia: The Vegan Dystopia

One contemporary form of dystopian thought, experienced by vegans, is known as Vystopia. The term “Vystopia”, originally coined by psychologist and existential psychotherapist Clare Mann, is defined as follows: “an existential crisis experienced by vegans, arising out of an awareness of the trance-like collusion with a dystopian world.” (Mann, 2018). Consistent with previous research on dystopian thought, Vystopia is believed to be associated with an array of psychosocial difficulties, including anxiety, depression, PTSD, self-admonishment, feelings of guilt, persistent nightmares, misanthropy and feeling alienated or disconnected from friends and family (The Vegan Society, 2023). Reflecting this growing recognition of Vystopia’s psychosocial significance, social psychologists have begun to study the phenomenon empirically; most notably, Trenkenschuh et al. (in press) recently developed and validated the first quantitative scale to measure Vystopia and its effects.

Previous work has focused on the negative personal consequences of viewing the world as a dystopia, making vegans who experience Vystopia a key group to research, in order to understand the psychology of dystopian worldviews more broadly. Furthermore, ethical vegans have previously been identified as a group that use utopian feelings to inspire radical action (Panayiotou, 2020), making those experiencing Vystopia a theoretically important group to understand if we hope to deepen our knowledge about those who immerse themselves in aspirations of alternative states of affairs.

Understanding the psychological antecedents and consequences of Vystopia may also inform the growing psychological literature concerned with the pursuit and maintenance of plant-forward diets. Compared to omnivorous diets, plant-forward diets are less resource-intensive and could therefore help to address major global issues like climate change (Carey et al., 2023). Accordingly, scholars and NGOs advocate for reducing animal-based food consumption in favor of plant proteins (Willett et al., 2019). Yet, adoption remains low (Bryant et al., 2022) with a commonly cited barrier being the anticipation of negative social consequences, for example denigration and ostracism (Markowski & Roxburgh, 2019). Research with practicing vegetarians and vegans corroborates many of the projected concerns of omnivores. Plant-forward eaters find themselves the target of prejudicial stereotypes (Aloni et al., 2024) and social coordination issues (e.g., exclusion from mealtimes) with close others (Gregson & Piazza, 2025). These negative social costs are key drivers of dietary abandonment (Anderson & Miyakawa, 2022) and may also lead to, or be confounded by experiences of Vystopia.

The Present Research

In the present study, we sought to investigate the lived experience and psychosocial antecedents of dystopian thought. Critically, we seek to study the psychological impacts of viewing current society as dystopian, relative to one's ideal state of affairs. This diverges from previous research, which typically examines dystopian thought as future-oriented. In contrast, our focus is on the absence of temporal distance - where dystopia is not a distant possibility but an immediate, perceived reality. Using social media data from the popular platform Reddit, we identified individuals who self-subscribe to a particular form of dystopian thought, Vystopia. Here, we adopted a novel approach to understanding the Vystopian experience, utilising computerised text analytic tools to analyse the public discourse of r/Vystopia users. Our research was guided by a series of pre-registered questions and analyses (see Veitch & Gregson, 2024)¹. All available data and scripts can be downloaded (see Veitch, 2025).

Research Questions

Sample Overview

For this research, we developed a custom pipeline utilizing the RStudio package RedditExtractorR (Rivera, 2023) to collect data from the subreddit r/Vystopia—a community who define themselves as: “a support group for vegans struggling with this phenomenon”. At the time of writing r/Vystopia has approximately 7,200 members. We collected all available posts, including both “submissions” (i.e., posts that users made to the forum: text or other content) and “comments” (i.e., posts made in response to other users’ posts). The final database included a total of 14,542 posts, made up of 991 submissions and 13,551 comments produced by 1,022 unique users. Each post represented a unique data point and was associated with the language content of the post, the date and time the post was made and the username of the account which made the post. To better understand r/Vystopia users, we additionally tallied the frequency of posts that each user made across all other publicly available subreddits. For means of comparative analysis we collected equivalently sized samples from r/AskReddit (Nposts = 11,996) and r/Vegan (Nposts = 13,760). We utilised a variety of text analysis methods for quantifying the text data from r/Vystopia, ranging from well-established word counting methods to topic modelling and corpus linguistics (see Supplementary Materials A for detailed descriptions of each method used, Veitch & Gregson, 2025).

RQ1: What Does Vystopia Mean to Vegans?

To understand the topics and issues that r/Vystopia users discuss within their community, we conducted a MEM analysis on the language data generated within r/Vystopia. Specifically, we analysed submissions with a word count ≥ 50 (N = 12,663). We then performed a PCA with varimax rotation on the binary word output generated using the MEH. Varimax rotation was used to align with the best practices for PCA for language data, which often recommend that each extracted component (theme) is rotated to be statistically independent from each other (Markowitz, 2021)². This is done to enhance the interpretability of themes in the corpus (in this instance r/Vystopia posts). The diagnostic Bartlett's Sphericity Test (χ2 = 30166.28, p < .001) and the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure (KMO = 0.684) indicated that a component type model was an acceptable fit for language data. Typically, evaluating component fit in PCA for language data utilises the “greater than one approach” which retains all components with an eigenvalue above one (Markowitz, 2021). This approach could not be applied to our data without undermining the interpretability of our themes as 64 components met this requirement. Consequently, based on inspection of the scree plot at the elbow bend we adopted a more conservative approach requiring components to have an eigenvalue of ≥ 2. This resulted in a 4-component solution being selected as the best fit for our data. Together the 4-components explained 7.78% of variance in the data which is within the expected range for language data (see, e.g., Ikizer et al., 2019; Kilimnik et al., 2018³). The 4-component solution, including word loadings, is displayed in Table 1.

To interpret each of the four components, we selected a sample of the 10 highest-scoring unique submissions for each component. Our analysis revealed four distinct themes of discussion pertaining to: 1) Interpersonal Relationships, 2) Philosophical Pessimism 3) Animal Commodification Confrontation, and 4) Systemic Carnism. The quotes that we present in the following subsections were taken from these samples and are intended to be most representative of the component.⁴

RQ2: Who Subscribes to a Vystopic Worldview?

In the absence of standard demographic data, we used a behavioural approach, analysing the subreddits frequented by r/Vystopia users to infer their interests and psychosocial characteristics. We compared these patterns to control groups: a neutral control group (r/AskReddit) and a dietary control group (r/vegan). The former offers a baseline due to its broad and neutral content (as used in Gregson et al., 2022), while the latter helps isolate characteristics specific to dystopian worldviews from those associated with veganism. Among the users sampled, only 2.34% appeared in both r/vegan and r/vystopia, and just 0.03% overlapped between r/vystopia and r/askreddit indicating sufficient independence between samples.

We employed a two-step analysis: first identifying the top ten subreddits most frequented by r/Vystopia users, then calculating %DIFF values to measure effect sizes in subreddit activity across groups. Positive %DIFF values indicate higher engagement in r/Vystopia than in the control groups, while BIC thresholds (BIC ≥ 2) were used to assess statistical significance (Gabrielatos, 2018). The Bayesian Information Criterion here is calculated using the log-likelihood value (a measure of how likely the observed frequency difference is under the null hypothesis) and the combined size of the two corpora being compared, using the formula: Bayesian Information Criterion ≈ log-likelihood – log(corpus size). Gabrielatos (2018) argues that while p-values are traditionally used to determine statistical significance, they are highly sensitive to corpus size and are often misinterpreted as indicators of how "important" or "relevant" a word or subreddit is. The p-value does not directly reflect the probability that a frequency difference is due to chance. Instead, the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) provides a more interpretable measure of evidence against the null hypothesis. BIC offers a graded scale: values above two indicate positive evidence, above six strong evidence, and above ten very strong evidence that the observed difference is not due to chance.

Results are detailed in Table 2 (see Supplementary Materials B for subreddit descriptions, Veitch & Gregson, 2025). r/Vystopia users showed strong engagement in vegan-related communities, including r/vegan, r/ShittyVeganFoodPorn, r/vegancirclejerk, and r/DebateAVegan, indicating that veganism (their ethical ideal) plays a central role in their online identities. The diversity of these subreddits—ranging from advocacy to satire and critique—suggests a highly reflexive engagement with vegan culture and ideology. Notably, participation in r/AutismInWomen points to a possible overlap between neurodivergent individuals and those drawn to Vystopian discourse, suggesting that some users may turn to Reddit for broader emotional and psychological support, not just moral alignment. This reinforces the idea that r/Vystopia functions as both an ideological and emotional support space. Additionally, increased activity in r/antinatalism lends further support to RQ1 findings, highlighting a strong interest in the ethics of procreation. This suggests that Vystopic users may not only question the morality of current societal norms but also grapple with deeper existential concerns about the value of life and the ethics of creating sentient beings in what they perceive to be a fundamentally flawed world.

Exploratory analysis shows that r/Vystopia users consistently focus on animal ethics, even outside their home subreddit. As illustrated in Figure 1, commonly used words in their r/Askreddit posts (such as “animal,” “suffering,” “reason,” and “moral”) suggest that the Vystopian perspective is pervasive and deeply integrated into their online presence. See Supplementary Materials C for word clouds from other frequently visited subreddits (Veitch & Gregson, 2025).

Click to enlarge

Figure 1

Most Frequent Words Used by r/Vystopia Users in the r/AskReddit Community

RQ3: What Linguistic Markers Differentiate Vystopic-Vegans From Controls?

To address this research question, we used a two-step analytic approach. First, we used BUTTER to compare the frequency of individual words across subreddits. We used the words from r/Vystopia with the top one hundred highest %DIFF scores relative to each control, r/vegan and r/AskReddit. Both researchers independently reviewed the high %DIFF words and the results from RQ1, then each suggested relevant LIWC dictionaries for further analysis; only the dictionaries identified by both researchers were retained for investigation. These were the following LIWC dictionaries: moral, negative emotion, mental health and death. We conducted a series of t-tests and found that relative to both r/AskReddit and r/Vegan users members of r/Vystopia use language related to morality, negative emotions, mental health and death at a higher rate (see Table 3).

A Perspective Shift: From Future-Oriented, to Current Experiences of Dystopia

We demonstrate that Vystopia not only aligns with insights from future-oriented research but also extends this understanding by illustrating that such cognitive and emotional processes can manifest in the present. We identified key psychological experiences commonly associated with Vystopia. These include strained interpersonal relationships, struggles with the ethical complexities of existence, distress over the systemic commodification of non-human animals, and an acute awareness of the pervasive nature of carnism. Though unique to Vystopia, these themes build on prior research on future-oriented dystopian thought, demonstrating that perceiving the present world as dystopian has comparable psychological states to fearing future dystopian worlds (Ogunbode et al., 2023). Specifically, we provide evidence that dystopian experience is associated with indicators of poor mental health and reluctance to have children. Crucially, we identify key distinctions between experiencing the current world as a dystopia and anticipating a dystopian future. The absence of temporal distance forces users to confront persistent reminders of a world they perceive as dystopian. This immediacy fosters a profound sense of inescapability, as prevailing societal norms remain fundamentally at odds with their ethical ideals.

Current Dystopian Worldviews and Their Personal Challenges

Our research uncovered several personal challenges that perceiving the world as dystopian is associated with. Linguistic analysis revealed that Vystopic vegans use significantly more language related to morality, death, negative emotions, and mental health than both non-Vystopic vegans and neutral controls. This suggests that experiencing the world as dystopian is linked to increased psychological distress, echoed by frequent mentions of suicide in the text data. In line with prior research on imagined alternative worlds, our findings show that Vystopian worldviews are rooted in dissatisfaction with prevailing moral norms - further evidenced by heightened discussion of morality and death. These themes appear specific to Vystopia rather than veganism more broadly, as they are less apparent in r/vegan.

This insight contributes to the ongoing debate about the relationship between plant-forward diets and mental health. While some nutrition researchers attribute higher rates of depression among vegans to dietary deficiencies, this is contested (Jain et al., 2022). Our findings suggest that moral disillusionment may also play a role. This aligns with Hopwood (2022), who argues that meat-reducers experience depression due to cognitive dissonance. We extend this idea, proposing that vegan-associated distress may stem either from misalignment between behaviour and ideals (meat-reducers) or between ideals and the state of the world (Vystopic vegans). Future research should focus on providing strong causal evidence about the relative role of how moral dissatisfaction and nutritional factors each contribute to mental health outcomes, to better support those pursuing plant-based diets.

Dystopian Experience is All Encompassing

Our findings suggest that dystopian experience can significantly shape online identity, particularly around ethical ideals. Vystopic vegans engaged more deeply with ethical veganism than both general vegans and neutral users, indicating a distinction between adopting a moralised practice and perceiving the world as dystopian. While r/vegan includes critiques of the food system, such discourse appears less central to users’ identities than on r/Vystopia. The urgency and emotional intensity of Vystopic posts suggest that dystopian thinking can be more consuming than general social criticism.

Although vegan activists are known to experience burnout due to the emotional toll of advocacy (Cox, 2011), the relationship between Vystopia and burnout remains unclear. These findings point to the role of dystopian worldviews in shaping identity, digital behaviour, and activism, with implications for the wellbeing of social change actors. Understanding the immersive nature of Vystopic thought may help activists in developing strategies that balance moral urgency with psychological resilience, supporting more sustainable forms of activism.

We found that Vystopic vegans, as a stigmatized minority, often report a lack of social support—potentially contributing to the adverse mental health outcomes discussed above. Research suggests that emotional and tangible support from loved ones can help individuals maintain plant-forward diets and protect against psychological distress (Gregson & Piazza, 2025). Accordingly, support—whether from close relationships or online communities like r/Vystopia—may serve as a buffer against the negative effects of dystopian thinking. While we observed some qualitative evidence for this, further study is needed. Emerging research also indicates that mass gatherings, such as The Vegan Campout festival, may help reduce isolation by creating a “temporary social majority” that reinforces identity and mental resilience (Prosser et al., 2025).

Future Directions

Given the breadth and exploratory nature of this study, several future research directions merit exploration in controlled settings. For instance, discussions on r/Vystopia often centered on the ethics of procreation. Given the contemporary moral debate surrounding population growth and decline (Cafaro, 2022), future work could examine how dystopian concerns—such as existential anxiety, environmental degradation, or perceived future quality of life—influence beliefs about having children, and whether those with dystopian worldviews extend their moral concern more readily to future generations.

At the societal level, future research could explore how dystopian experience influences collective action—such as activism, political dissent, or shifts in voting behaviour—as well as how expressions of dystopian sentiment are perceived by others. For example, third-party responses to Vystopic vegans may either support or hinder broader movements like plant-based advocacy.

It remains unclear whether holding a dystopian worldview reflects a broader psychological disposition. Future research should explore whether certain personality traits, cognitive styles, or developmental experiences predispose individuals to these worldviews. Investigating the link between dystopian worldviews and mental health could clarify whether such beliefs contribute to, or result from, psychological distress.

Conclusion

In a growing body of literature, researchers are beginning to explore the psychological experiences of individuals who perceive the world as a dystopia (Daysh et al., 2024). The present study investigated Vystopia—a form of dystopia, experienced by ethical vegans who see society as morally failing—through the perspectives shared in a dedicated online community. Our findings reveal that r/Vystopia users are unique in the intensity with which they center their identities around ethical ideals, grapple with existential questions about morality and existence, and confront the systemic commodification of animals. While the Vystopian worldview highlights significant personal costs, such as strained relationships and negative mental health impacts, it also underscores the transformative potential of moral conviction in driving collective reflection and action. Understanding the experiences of Vystopic-vegans offers valuable insights for moral psychologists, as well as opportunities for advocates to navigate the complex emotional landscape of veganism and refine their approaches to managing their wellbeing whilst advocating for food-system change.