Who Is Creating the Problems We Keep Solving?

Author: Acharya Prashant

During London Climate Action Week earlier this year, I was asked where an ordinary individual should begin acting against climate change. The word ‘begin’ carried an assumption: we have been acting all along. Every day we buy, travel, build, earn, consume, raise children and make choices. The environmental crisis did not arise because humanity sat idle; much of it arose from what we have been so busily doing. Before asking what new activity might save the planet, should we not look at the activities that brought it to this condition?

An injured animal is pulled from a roadside drain and nursed back to health. Volunteers clean a polluted riverbank, and an anxious young person receives counselling and recovers. Yet the animal may have been hurt because roads and buildings had encroached upon her habitat, while the waste in the river may consist largely of products we go on manufacturing and buying. The young person’s distress, too, may have a great deal to do with what family and society expected of her. Each case has been dealt with, and the conditions producing all three remain more or less where they were. We are eager to know what more we can do for the world, and far less eager to ask what we must stop doing to it.

The wrongdoer and the benefactor are not always the same person. A relief worker may have contributed nothing to the war whose victims she serves, and responsibility is unequally distributed; a general accusation against humanity must never be allowed to hide the greater power of particular industries, governments and individuals. Still, the two roles often sit close together. A businessman can damage the environment through his enterprise and restore a little of it through philanthropy, and any of us can take part in both the injury and its remedy without noticing the contradiction.

Why do we keep creating conditions that demand such enormous efforts of repair? Through the whole cycle of harming, regretting, helping and congratulating ourselves, something stays exactly as it was. We assume the problem lies outside us and that we are qualified to solve it. What if the problem-maker himself is part of what needs solving?

When helping becomes a measure of success

A food-relief organisation distributes half a million meals one year and a million the next, and its annual report declares that its impact has doubled. Perhaps it has reached more hungry people, which is no small thing. Hunger may also have increased, though, so that twice as many meals are now needed just to keep a worsening situation from turning catastrophic. Fewer people needing those meals would surely be the greater achievement, even if it made for a thinner annual report.

UNEP’s Food Waste Index Report 2024 found that households wasted the equivalent of over a billion meals a day in 2022, a year in which an estimated 783 million people went hungry. Wasted food cannot simply be carried to the hungry, and the two problems have different causes. Even so, a civilisation that organises vast efforts against hunger while tolerating so much avoidable waste needs to look further than its distribution systems.

It is easy to lose the distinction between measuring our efforts and measuring the problem. Institutions count beneficiaries reached, funds raised and programmes expanded; these numbers matter, but none of them shows whether the underlying condition is improving. The Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2026 found that 95 per cent of funding for UN-coordinated appeals in 2025 went to protracted crises, compared with 54 per cent in 2016, and that the average protracted crisis has had a response plan in place for fifteen years. Relief agencies did not choose this. The emergencies have simply refused to end.

Dasra’s India Nonprofit Report 2026, surveying 438 organisations, found that 68 per cent had faced a funding deficit in 2024-25 and 73 per cent had no corpus fund. An organisation struggling to pay for its immediate services will find it hard to invest in the slower work of reducing the need for them. People must get the help they need today. Someone also has to look at the conditions that will bring them back for the same help tomorrow.

An organisation begins as an instrument serving a purpose. Over time it acquires employees, supporters and a reputation, and the instrument turns into something to be preserved. Growth starts to look like progress, even when it may only mean that the original problem has grown too. If the problem shrank so much that half its programmes became unnecessary, would the organisation welcome the news? I am not sure many of us would be glad to become less important because the suffering we address had diminished.

Sincere service has to include a willingness to make itself unnecessary wherever it can. Without that, we may start out wanting suffering to end and slowly grow attached to being indispensable.

The polluter’s clean-up drive

Breaking the Plastic Wave 2025, a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts and SYSTEMIQ, estimates that about 130 million tonnes of plastic now enter the land, air and water every year, a figure that could reach 280 million tonnes a year by 2040 without major changes. It is entirely possible to keep improving how waste is collected and processed while producing it faster than those systems can cope with.

A company manufacturing disposable packaging may sponsor a river-cleaning campaign. The volunteers are sincere and the waste they gather is real; the riverbank is cleaner when they leave. By evening, fresh waste has drifted down from upstream. The next morning they are back. The river would be dirtier without them, yet no amount of effort downstream can make the cleaning last while the company keeps putting more packaging into circulation. A good deed is not a receipt that cancels what we go on doing, and a cleaner image for the company means little unless less damage is actually being done.

In a 2012 study in Business History Review, the historian Bartow J. Elmore described how sections of the American beverage and packaging industries promoted curbside recycling while resisting container-deposit laws and other measures to reduce waste at its source. Public attention moved to what citizens should do with waste and away from what companies should be producing.

Regulation does matter; when corporations control production and governments shape the rules, the burden cannot be laid on consumers alone, and reform must not wait until everyone has examined themselves. Nor can workers without basic security be asked to carry what belongs to powerful employers and governments. The law, though, can only restrain harmful action. It cannot by itself end the craving for status, which simply looks for another outlet, so that a particular kind of pollution may fall while the compulsive pursuit of more goes unquestioned.

I was in Bengaluru last year. It knows both water scarcity and flooding. Tankers deliver water when neighbourhoods run short; after heavy rain, pumps and rescue teams deal with inundated roads. Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science have recorded the city’s built-up area rising from about 8 per cent in 1973 to 58 per cent in 2012, with wetlands declining by 79 per cent and water bodies shrinking from 3.4 per cent of the city to under 1 per cent. We do not control the rain, but we do decide what gets built over. The same city trucks water in during shortages and pumps it out during floods, and the decisions that keep both operations necessary are the ones we least often question.

Our compassion towards animals is curiously selective. The FAO’s Food Outlook of June 2026 forecasts world meat production of 391 million tonnes this year, and behind that tonnage are living beings; counting them only in tonnes already forgets that each of them could feel pain. There are shelters, rescue campaigns and public expressions of concern about cruelty, while animal use on a vast scale is largely accepted. An injured dog moves us, yet the suffering of a pig or a chicken may scarcely cross our minds. The same animal can be a companion in one place and food in another, and her capacity to suffer does not change with our customs, however much our justifications do.

In India, reverence for the cow coexists with the largest dairy industry in the world, producing over 247 million tonnes of milk in 2024-25, nearly a quarter of global output. It is possible to call an animal sacred while refusing to look at how dairy animals are bred, confined, milked and eventually discarded. Wherever we have a choice, we ought to ask whether our pleasures require avoidable suffering from another being. Custom cannot answer that for us, and kindness to one animal does not make up for cruelty to another.

When I spoke recently with the philosopher Peter Singer, whose work for animals spans more than fifty years, he acknowledged that the number of animals suffering in factory farms worldwide has kept rising. Animal advocacy has done real good, yet for all the awareness of cruelty it has created, the machinery of cruelty continues to expand. We talk a great deal about the animal who suffers and very little about the human being who wants to consume her.

Professor Singer asked whether educating the self could deliver practical results. I shared a calculation from our work through the PrashantAdvait Foundation: by our estimate, we have already helped spare at least ten million animals from slaughter. We do not start with a code of dietary commandments; we ask people to look at the consumer himself, at why he wants what he wants and what he believes food, pleasure or tradition will give him. As people begin to question these compulsions, their diets and other habits of consumption change, so the benefit to animals is not separate from self-inquiry and can follow from it.

Becoming vegan, however, must not turn into another certificate of goodness the ego issues to itself. One can give up animal products and still exploit people, resources or even oneself. Many of the species harmed by human activity are not animals we eat at all; their habitats vanish and their surroundings change under the pressure of what we call ordinary prosperity. So the question cannot stop at what is on the plate, and has to reach the person sitting at the table.

If we love an animal, our concern should go further than the chance to rescue her. A wild animal whose habitat has been destroyed needs safety, not repeated rescue from dangers we introduced. Compassion sometimes calls for intervention and sometimes for restraint, and at times the most meaningful help we can offer another living being is to stop interfering with her life.

The unhappiness we teach, and then try to cure

A child is told she is loved unconditionally, while family conversation keeps circling back to examination results, college admissions and earnings. She is encouraged to think independently, so long as her independence leads to a career the family considers respectable, and an interesting but unprestigious career may disappoint them more than a lucrative one that leaves her miserable. Whatever her parents say about love, their conduct teaches her a condition nobody has stated, that she must become somebody to be worthy of it.

Often the parent is sincerely worried about the child’s future, and economic insecurity is real enough. Alongside that worry, though, there may be another motive. The child’s achievements have become a way of reassuring the parent about his own life: she must succeed so that he can feel successful, and her status must protect his. Concern presented as being for another may also be an attempt to secure one’s own psychological identity.

I meet young people who can solve difficult technical problems but have rarely asked why their ambitions matter to them. They question assumptions in science and seldom the ones governing their own lives, such as why a particular salary must be desirable, or why a prestigious institution should seem to confer personal worth. Education can make the intellect highly capable without making the individual honest about what that intellect is being used for.

We spend years teaching the young that being somebody means getting ahead of somebody else. Security comes to mean possessing more, an ordinary life starts to look frightening, and anxiety, comparison and the fear of failure follow. Then we offer counselling, meditation and stress-management techniques. Such help may be urgently needed. But why teach someone for twenty years that falling behind is a disaster, only to teach her breathing exercises so that she can bear it? Should we only help the child endure the pressure, or should the adults creating it look at themselves?

A student needs science, mathematics and the skills to earn a living. She also needs the freedom to ask why another student’s rank should diminish her worth, and whose ambition she is trying to fulfil. Without that inquiry, education equips a person to pursue a goal more efficiently while leaving her unable to ask whether the goal merits the effort. We teach children how to solve problems, and we have to teach them as well to look at the one who creates them.

The child grows up and carries the same measure of success into society. UNEP’s Global Resources Outlook 2024 reported that high-income countries use roughly six times as many materials per person as low-income countries and generate around ten times the consumption-related climate impacts. The needs of those lacking essentials cannot be equated with the desires of the affluent, and consumption cannot be separated from inequality. Among the materially comfortable, though, what is one more luxury purchase, property or status symbol expected to deliver? The object may well be useful; the psychological demand we place on it is another matter. Unless we look at what makes acquisition seem so desirable, our efforts to reduce suffering will run alongside a machinery that keeps producing it.

Who is the one who wants so much?

Why does a person who has enough want more, and why does someone else’s achievement spoil the satisfaction of one’s own? Even helping somebody can become a way of establishing one’s worth.

I call this persistent claimant the ego. By ego I do not mean merely arrogance, boastfulness or an inflated opinion of oneself, but the psychological ‘I’ that takes itself to be a particular somebody, identifies with the body, family, possessions, opinions, accomplishments and social position, and seeks security and fulfilment through these identifications. At its centre is a sense of incompleteness. It regards itself as deficient and approaches the world as though something out there must make good the deficiency.

The ego is not simply a concept produced by thought; it is the subject for whom thoughts acquire importance, the claimant behind endless arguments, justifications and expectations. The body has its instincts, and the mind can think, remember and calculate. Trouble begins when the psychological ‘I’ turns them into instruments of its search for security and self-importance. A mind can be brilliant about the world and still serve an unexamined master. This ‘I’ is a lived experience, but its claims about what it is need not be true, and we keep trying to improve it without ever checking those claims.

Tell me that a boy has been tormenting animals, and I can give you several reasons why he must face consequences. Now tell me the boy is my son. Suddenly I find equally persuasive arguments in his defence. His actions are the same. Only my relationship with him has changed, and the intellect that could establish his wrongdoing now works tirelessly to excuse it. We pride ourselves on being rational, yet we rarely ask who is doing the reasoning.

Money can provide necessities, comfort and some protection against material uncertainty, but it cannot make its possessor worthy of existence. When we demand from something what it cannot give, no quantity is ever enough, and we keep acquiring because the expected satisfaction never arrives. The inward demand for completion turns into a demand for products, status and endless growth. Meeting it consumes materials, land and energy without settling the insecurity behind it. So the demand returns. A private insecurity ends up as a burden on rivers, forests, animals and the atmosphere.

Yesterday I wanted to be wealthier than others; today I want to be more respected than they are, and the distinction I once sought through consumption I now seek through restraint. The activity may well have changed for the better, with real benefits, while the claim to be somebody survives intact. The ego can grow proud even of its humility, and attached to its reputation for being unattached.

Bodily pain, hunger and war require practical attention and justice. Investigating the ego does not mean dismissing material suffering, or pretending that every hardship was created by the person undergoing it. Alongside these is another suffering, born of the demand that the world keep confirming and completing me. The man endlessly accumulating possessions is not necessarily a happy man who refuses to think of others; he may already be suffering from the compulsion to accumulate, afraid of insignificance and dependent on others’ opinions. Give him enough resources and this private bondage becomes a public problem, whose consequences we then manage without ever looking at the inward condition they arise from.

We assume the problem is separate from the one who has identified it. A parent sends an anxious child for counselling without questioning the demands that produced her fear, and a consumer worries about pollution while treating his own desire for more possessions as beyond question. The problem gets defined in a way that leaves the problem-maker untouched. Then the same ‘I’ that has been producing the disorder steps forward with a programme to correct it, and gains a new identity as the responsible parent, the conscious consumer or the saviour. Unless that ‘I’ is examined, even a real remedy becomes one more way for it to stay important. We will question the world readily enough, but hardly ever the one who claims to know what is wrong with it.

When goodness becomes another possession

The ego does not disappear when a person takes up socially useful work; it may simply find a more respectable identity, since the claim to be somebody can express itself through philanthropy as readily as through wealth. A problem that persists can even be useful to me, because solving it again and again gives me a role, and ending it may cost me that role. Stopping harmful production can cost a businessman his profits, while sponsoring relief earns him praise. The good deed becomes one more possession and proof of personal worth. If nobody depended on my generosity, who would I be?

Good deeds can also become a way of not looking at the rest of one’s life. A donor gives generously and grows less willing to question how his wealth is accumulated; a parent makes sacrifices for a child and holds them up as proof of love while refusing to let the child live freely. Goodness turns into a defence against recognising wrongdoing, and we count our virtues as though they could cancel the harm we go on doing. Once the identity of being good is established, inconvenient facts start to feel like threats, and criticism of one’s conduct like an attack on one’s very being. The image of being good then keeps us from seeing where we are wrong.

An animal rescued by someone seeking admiration has still been rescued, and food handed out by a vain donor still nourishes those who eat it. The benefactor, however, cannot use that relief as proof of his inner freedom. What an action accomplishes has to be looked at, and so does the condition of the person performing it; neither inquiry can stand in for the other. Legitimate recognition is not vanity either, and people deserve fair credit for their work. I still have to ask whether the good accomplished remains good to me once I am no longer at its centre.

Compassion cannot stop at relief. Relief meets suffering where it is found, while compassion also goes after its source, the conditions producing the suffering and finally the one whose demands those conditions serve. It has to ask whether the need being satisfied is real. A hungry person needs food. A young man who believes he is worthless without an impressive salary is hardly helped by being taught to earn more, and it is quite possible to satisfy a person’s desire while tightening the very bondage that makes her suffer. Help sometimes means supplying what is lacking, and sometimes questioning a demand that has been passing itself off as a need.

The price of ceasing to harm

Self-examination is often presented as though it were mainly a matter of acquiring information: we are told to recognise our habits and motives. That understanding is needed, though it seldom settles anything by itself. Often we already know that something is wrong, that our demands, practices and indulgences cause harm. Yet we continue. Knowledge is not always what is missing; more often, taking it seriously would mean giving up something we cherish.

Seeing must be accompanied by intent. To see is to recognise what is actually happening, without arranging the evidence to protect our preferences. Intent is the willingness to stand by what has been seen even when it threatens an advantage, a pleasure, a relationship or an identity. I am tested less by whether I can explain why cruelty is wrong than by whether I will refuse to take part in it when taking part benefits me. For the parent who has recognised his own ambition in the child’s choices, that test arrives on the day the child rejects the prestigious career; for the businessman, with the next profitable but harmful contract. A consumer meets it when deciding whether to keep buying what he knows to be harmful, not when he forwards a message about the environment. If nothing changes where the cost actually has to be paid, what have I seen?

The price is not always money or comfort. Sometimes it is the image one has built of oneself, as when a parent has to give up the pride of being associated with a prestigious child. Such changes are hard because the ego has made these things part of its identity, and when an identification is questioned, it feels as though the person himself were being diminished. The one estimating the cost is also the one attached, so naturally the cost seems unbearable, and we often find out what we were really surrendering only after letting it go. If I give up the demand that my child fulfil my ambitions, have I lost love, or become more capable of loving? A possession through which I sought superiority may have kept me dependent on comparison all along. And if I stop seeking appreciation for my service, does the service become poorer, or simply freer of the burden of establishing my worth?

We tend to imagine goodness as something added on, another donation or campaign or programme, and addition leaves our existing life largely intact. Omission is more demanding, because it means ending a profitable harm and letting a child live without carrying my ambition. It means no longer consuming what I can see is cruel, and no longer needing applause for whatever good I do.

Renunciation is usually spoken of as though a person were surrendering happiness for a noble cause. That may produce discipline, but it leaves the original belief in place, that the object would have made one happy if only one had been allowed to enjoy it. Restraint then feels like deprivation, and the desire keeps commanding inward obedience. Once a person sees that the object was being asked for something it could never provide, its authority starts to weaken, and the supposed sacrifice turns out to be freedom from a demand that had never fulfilled us anyway.

I call this longing to be free of falsehood love. Love is not merely a pleasant feeling towards another person, nor a virtue to be displayed; it is the urge to be free of the compulsions that keep us inwardly bound. If I love a child, I must be willing to release the child from my unfulfilled ambitions. Loving animals means I cannot refuse to look at the suffering my customary pleasures require, and loving truth means my beliefs and self-image cannot be kept protected from it. The person trapped in endless acquisition is not only harming the world but is himself captive to the compulsion to acquire, so his freedom and the world’s relief need not be opposing goals. Love is the movement towards that freedom, and its measure is what one actually gives up, not what one is merely prepared to give up.

None of this means waiting for some imaginary state of inner perfection before doing useful work. The wounded animal cannot wait for my enlightenment, nor the hungry person for me to be free of vanity, and in any case the ego has no final certificate of freedom to issue itself.

Service that comes out of such examination would still feed the hungry, treat the injured, protect the vulnerable and clean polluted rivers, while also working to remove the conditions that make those interventions necessary again and again. The manufacturer would have to stop defending profitable sources of waste rather than just finance another clean-up, and the parent reconsider the demand for achievement as proof of worth rather than just pay for therapy. Such changes may require giving up an advantage rather than giving away a little of its proceeds, and the purpose would come to matter more than the doer.

We measure goodness by what we add to the world. It could just as well be measured by how much avoidable harm we have stopped causing, and the acts this asks for are rarely spectacular; they may bring no photographs, applause or public recognition, which is perhaps why they count for so much. We have become very good at repairing the consequences of our pursuits, and far less willing to question the pursuits themselves. Before setting out to save the world, should I not ask how much of it needs saving from me?

Acharya Prashant is a philosopher and author whose work centres on self-examination and its application to contemporary life; Views presented are personal.