I’ve been in that spot for a long time and my excuse always was that vegetarianism would be too inconvenient.
Around the end of last year it finally clicked. The inconvenience excuse is plainly wrong in many cases AND being a vegetarian in just these cases is still a good thing!
I resolved to eat vegetarian whenever it is not inconvenient. This turned out to be almost always. Especially easy are restaurants and ordered food. When in a supermarket I never buy meat which automatically sets me up for lots of vegetarian meals.
I’m currently eating vegetarian on ~95% of my meals. As a bonus I don’t have a bad conscience in the few cases where I eat meat.
I find the qualitative reflections most enlightening and especially that you said: “But never in the course of this experiment did I count something that turned out to be unimportant.”
Your under-confidence in that point may be very common leading to thoughts like: “Yea noticing confusion is all nice but I usually do that already. I’m fairly certain that I’m only missing some irrelevant confusion.” Your experience suggests that there is no such thing as irrelevant confusion. The art is to notice as many as humanly possible instead of just some.
I have never read a better motivation to go and actively try to notice confusion than this sentence. Thanks.