The harsh reality of Sustainability

If you are intellectual about it, then you will be impractical. Seeking conceptual clarity, logical consistency and theoretical completeness, means possibly lacking in one or more among empirical validity, urgency, practical value and popular appeal.

If you are too activistic, then you probably lack rigor 

If you take it too seriously, you become sanctimonious

If you talk incremental changes, they might not scale up or lead to big changes that appear necessary 

If you talk big changes, there is a risk of large unintended harmful consequences 

If you don't endure real pain and hardship in its pursuit, then you are not authentic. 

If you sacrifice and endure hardship, it still does not mean you have the right to ask others to sacrifice for the sake of greater good or belittle others' choices.  

If you feel good about helping the cause, then you are deriving personal benefits and not truly altruistic

If you don't feel good about it, then you are probably not going to do what it takes 

If you are paid to study or sell it, then you are not unbiased

If you are not paid to do it but yet do it, it is a choice or worse a privilege  

If you are not paid to work on it and it is not out of choice, then you have some real skin in the game which makes you biased but authentic. I prefer biased and authentic over inauthentic. Unbiasedness is too much to ask whereas authenticity is indispensable.

And then there are things we dont know that we dont know.

I am not convinvced that many people talking about Sustainability and Climate change are  themselves enduring real and meaningful pain and hardship. Often they are  people who also get paid for it and feel it is more important what they have to say or contribute financially or believe in the power of technology or energy rather than being honest about how their own wealth and consumption is excessive. Effective altruism is a philosophy that supports this world view but them Sam Bankman-Fried was the most popular face of effective altruism. 

In sum, sustainability, for me, is about doing the hard stuff that requires real personal sacrifice. But then we are ingenious at finding solutions to make the hard stuff easy and that is the source of all problems. So do the hard stuff and keep it hard which is hard because we live in a society where we are told the most important thing is to maximize pleasure or happiness. But if the one truth about human nature is that we seek happiness, and if that has what has led to an unsustainable world, then may be it is our pursuit of happiness which is the root of the problem and not simply fossil fuels and evil corporations. 

The ethics of hiring maids and professionals for cleaning our private spaces

This is specifically about hiring help to clean one's own private spaces - mainly homes and speaks to the  social dimension of sustainability. 

At the outset as an Indian and as someone considers Vedantic and more broadly India philosophical thought as amongst the deepest intellectual and spiritual achievements of humanity (I am not ready to write about how the concept of Karma is a logically quite sound albeit empirically unvalidatable theory to explain one's predicament needs further refinement), the same philosophy has been misused to treat people engaged in those professions unfairly, inhumanely and uncompassionately. Having said that, things did not descend to the level of sanctioning slave ownership as with other supposedly more enlightened societies, and cultures nor is it used to justify a call to assassinating or murdering people in the name of religion. Also not sure which is worse - keeping people engaged in cleaning near oneself but as a slave or treating them as impure enough to banish them to the remote corners of a village or town without enslaving them. Needless to say, both are unacceptable. I am also not talking about practical enslavement as indentured labor which was neither casteist nor a monopoly of Indian/Hindu society. In fact the outcastes probably never even qualified for an usurious loan in the first place. And I say this not as a normative statement about the cleaning class but a really sad empirical fact that the descendants of the upper castes and classes cannot simply wish away but need to come to terms with it without feeling the need to disown their culture or tradition entirely. Same goes for minorities who demolished and denigrated the beliefs of the majority (yes, I am not mistaken minorities heaping misery on majority as it happened during colonization of India starting with the Islamic invasions). After all, that Neils Bohr and Robert Oppenheimer found Vedanta as deeper than their own religious traditions, should count for something. Also looking down on cleaning or trash is a universal human virtue across time and societies and nothing uniquely Hindu about it. I am sure evolutionary psychology can surely suggest a scientific basis. There are a lot of activities that a parent would wish their child not make a career out of and I will hazard a guess being a hired cleaning help will be on that list even for people employed in that profession let alone for those who aren't. Again this is a statement of fact and not a normative claim of how it ought to be. 

Cleaning one's own home regularly is something most people will prefer to have someone else do it for them if they could afford it. Of course, there is the convenient argument that one's time is worth more and since we dont do many things ourselves, this is one such. We don't grow our own food, stitch our clothes, make our own fuels and electricity, etc. the list is endless. So this is perhaps the strongest argument in favor of getting hired cleaning help. But what about the morality of having someone else clean your private spaces, toilets, and trash. Even by providing the safest of chemicals and equipments and paying fair wages,  you are still having them do your dirty work. This is one area where I wouldn't have qualms about robots taking jobs away from cleaning people for the psychic benefit for me from not having one human clean another's refuse outweighs the cost of taking away a job that provides employment for the poorer amongst us. 

Going a step further, what about simply entertaining the thought that I want to do great things, intellectual things, be a leader, change minds, be my own boss and not work for anyone etc Aren't each of these essentially looking down on people doing what one sees as less prestigious work? Viewed from this perspective, a person who says I will do whatever makes we earn more or become more wealthy is far more honourable than those who say I dont care for the money.