I love my reverse osmosis filter, it stands for everything I despise

It was my wife's idea. She'd badgered me day after day about the taste of our already Brita'd tap water, worried about contaminants and PFAS. After coming back from upstate NY and getting a firsthand side-by-side difference of "nice tasting" vs "average" water, I gave in.

I bought the most popular decent unit on Amazon, a 5 stage set of PVC tubes and Saran-wrapped filters that just barely fit under my kitchen sink with quite a bit of help from a plumber friend of mine. We ran a couple flushes through until the water ran truly clear, then gave it a taste.

Beautiful.

It was as if a pure spring had sprung forth in my cramped townhouse abode. Every glass of water tasted like a fresh rain, every sip an introspective pause. I've since gotten used to using the reverse osmosis faucet for cooking rice, making tea, and filling my bottle to the brim every morning before work. On the occasions I run out midday, I draw a deep sigh before dragging my feet out to the hallway to taint my bottle with the poorly maintained Elkay water fountain at my office complex.

I've come to accept that I would not go without this massive improvement to my quality of life, that I'll insist on installing one in any residence we move into. I'd recommend it to anyone reading this and is still on the fence, yet I hate what it stands for.

To explain my dislike for a product I've spent the past 4 paragraphs praising, let's digress and talk about trains for a moment. My wife and I love them, the freedom to sit back and watch the scenery flash by. From the Japanese Shinkansen to the sprawling rail network of India, they're a staple of many countries' transit ecosystem, and for good reason. Put everyone heading in the same direction in the same big vehicle, have one professional driver take them there by the guidance of professional coordinators and systems engineers, and drop them all off within walking distance of their destination. Do that in 10 minute intervals and you've achieved huge economies of scale compared to 1 driver, 1 vehicle, and blinky lights half of those on the road choose to ignore. In the many nations with proper public transit infrastructure, they're an incredibly safe, fast, and preferable alternative to automobiles. However, their success relies on one thing: usage. If trains spend the majority of their time nearly empty, those efficiencies are lost. The incoming funding from tickets is outstripped by costs and cuts are made. Cuts reduce the quality and frequency of service, so fewer people ride. On the other end, when the majority of people take the public transit, there's ample funding and political will to improve service, increase coverage, upgrade infrastructure. The more, the more — the less, the less.

Now, how does any of this relate to my RO filter? Simply put, it's a sign that a "public good" is being replaced by "individual responsibility". We have, in the United States, well regulated public utilities that turn rivers and lakes into cleaned, filtered drinking water. They do this process en-masse, piping millions of gallons to millions of households to be used for everything from lawns to pasta. This water is held in very high tolerances, with my local utility releasing lab reports of the water supply every month, measuring everything from lead levels to PFAS contamination. The resulting output from my faucet should then be safe to drink, clean, and plentiful, which it is.

Yet, the output of my filter is cleaner and tastier. RO removes 90% of the PFAS in the water and leaves almost pure H₂O behind, where the mineralizer adds the right balance of compounds to give it a "fresh spring water" flair. It's an undeniable, marked improvement compared to the baseline, and that's worrisome. It's troubling because it is nice, it is better, it makes sense to install one. With every household that spends the hundreds to put one in place, the political will to put resources towards improving the public good diminishes.

Every house drinking RO is a house that cares less if the water has a slight sulfurous smell, that votes not to raise rates to overhaul the century-old pipes. Those with the means hop onto the trend that tastes like fresh glacial melt, while those stuck with tap water sink further into the rising sea of aging infrastructure. By the time the issue becomes dire, the only victims will be those most vulnerable and least able to do anything about it.

So yes, I love my RO filter. I’ve never had better-tasting water come out of my home faucet. It’s like riding a horseless carriage through the horse-dropping-caked streets of New York, leisurely passing all the walking public in 1920. Yet, that simple choice leads to a Prisoner’s dilemma, where the Nash equilibrium sits at a deadlocked intersection of mutually selfish choices. This isn’t a new idea, my wife comes from a land where it’s already commonplace. India’s upper class nearly universally have RO systems, while 342 million of their most impoverished lack access to safe drinking water entirely. Never mind that these systems generally waste 3 gallons of otherwise potable water for every 1 gallon they purify, an incredibly stark contrast in a nation facing active water scarcity.

North Carolina has no such lack of water flowing through its rivers, but similarly no lack of PFAS thanks to truly soulless profiteering at DuPont and 3M. Every modern airport still uses it in their firefighting foam, and the various drills they perform tend to saturate the local area with shocking amounts of short-chain fluorinated compounds. I happen to live fairly close to one such airport, and while the local municipality doesn’t source its water from anywhere close by, their reports do indicate a low but notable amount of contamination. So I’ll continue to fill my water bottle at the RO fountain every morning, and I’ll cook my rice with the same. It's a luxury I can no longer live without, and if history is any indication, soon neither could you.