I'm not sure if this is exactly the sense in which your original question is being asked, but it seems relevant. in the comments below you say

> I no longer believe that living by example is sufficient to defend animals, the same way that I don't think it's ok to stand by and watch an expression of racism or sexism.

This is certainly a challenging decision to make, and I applaud your dedication to principles. But it's interesting to me because it illustrates something I've been thinking about lately, and something I've used to inform some significant lifestyle changes.

I care a lot about Doing The Right Thing, Making The World A Better Place, Living My Principles, and all the other ways of describing these things. But in the course of my trying to live my principles, I've butted heads with many different activists in many different areas. And this has scared me. Because, what I've seen, is that for every 1 sincere activist who really believes they're doing the right thing, there seems to be 10 who are just in it for selfish personal reasons. Status and glory, perhaps? Establishing a petty tyranny, maybe? Because it's something to do?

This scares me, a lot. For someone such as yourself, who has a dedication to veganism and animal welfare, it is relatively easy to stay focused on your goal. But for the kinds of activists attracted by glory, they have no such orientation.

What I have seen, in trying to live my principles, is the fact that the majority of activist hierarchies I've seen, do more harm than good. They get co-opted by leaders with unsavoury goals, they encourage social norms that are damaging to bystanders, and they are generally ineffective at achieving their stated goals (they may be effective at achieving unstated goals).

How has this informed 'conscious lifestyle changes' on my part? It's helped me realize the value of compromise, of being a good neighbour, of creating community. It's helped me realize that, most of the time, Being A Decent Person To Those Around You is more important than living one's activist politics. This is a really hard thing to do. To intercept your own thought process and say "sure, this feels like you're talking to an evil person who is working against you and negatively influencing society, but you could be wrong, and destroying the existing social fabric and amicable relationships around this person is Not Worth It.", is very difficult. But it is worth it, in the long run. Creating and maintaining mutually respectful, courteous, friendly communities is more important than achieving one's activist goals. Even for activist goals that seem extremely important (racism and sexism are two big ones for me here. It's been a challenge to figure out how to still work towards solving those problems, without causing so much collateral damage in the mean time).

In short: my conscious lifestyle change is realizing the value of being quiet to keep the peace. This has been impactful in a lot of ways