A Karaoke Rockstar as a Metaphor for Sustainable Homeowners

Many people are passionate about sustainable living. One poll showed that 84% of people think sustainability is an important feature of a home. They recognize the growing threat of climate change and want to do their part to minimize it. However, they struggle to be consistent about living an eco-friendly lifestyle. They need to change their mindset and alter their behavior in a major way. We recently saw an interesting similarity between sustainable homeowners and great karaoke singers that we thought help get the point across.

The Role Between Being an Exceptional Karaoke Singer and a Green Homeowner

There are a number of challenges that can keep people from adhering to their commitment to sustainable living. One of the biggest reasons that they don’t fulfill their pledge to eco-friendly living is that they focus more on activities that people will praise them for than on behavioral changes that will actually slow the progression of climate change.

This is where our comparison between karaoke singers and green homeowners comes into play. While it might seem like a strange analogy and may even sound somewhat crazy, there are a surprising number of similarities. With so many different variables at play, this becomes a good deal once you begin to break it down a bit.

Life is hectic, so many things take a lot of time and end up consuming a lot of energy despite having a fairly small footprint on the surface. When you are extremely active, you have a lot going on that most of the world is never going to see. Because of this, a lot of people are going to make judgments that you really don’t deserve to have dropped on you.

As a green homeowner, you might make changes that will actually lower your carbon footprint. However, uneducated people might not realize that these changes are actually helpful to the environment, because they get caught up with the cliché climate change narratives that they read about online. You might not get the recognition that you deserve, which might cause you to back away from them.

You might need to adapt more visible eco-friendly changes to follow through on your pledge. This may sound ridiculous at first. Nonetheless, there are some advantages to all of this.

The Surface and What It Entails

Perception can often be different and more important than reality. This shouldn’t be the case with climate change, but it is in a sense. People will engage in behaviors they think make a difference, so it is necessary to change their perceptions to lead them to follow eco-friendly lifestyles.

So much of the world is so dedicated to how things appear to be on the surface. While this can be great for a lot of applications, in karaoke, as well as homeownership, and your life in general, it can actually work against you. Everyone sees what you look like when you go up on stage, and can hear in your voice how well it works. This is the outward manifestation of the work you’ve put in over the years, singing to yourself and learning to control your breath and posture. The same can be said about someone trying to embrace a sustainable lifestyle.

By the same token, everyone sees the outside of your home and the people you invite see the interior. They will make major judgments about your decisions to either embrace or reject sustainability. What they don’t see is all of the maintenance you have to perform, or how much of a strain this can put on your mind, your body, and your life in general. The surface will tell a person some things, such as how meticulous you are and how dedicated you are to keeping up appearances. But then, it will often give people a false sense of who you are, if you’re struggling to keep up the great facade.

The Inside Work

Working on anything takes roughly 10,000 hours to master or at least to get to become somewhat proficient.  This is the equivalent of over a year of a full-time job or working at it for two years at 4 hours in an average day. To put it mildly, this is a serious time commitment to put into just about anything. Sustainable living is no exception. You need to make a lot of improvements to your home, communicate new sustainable habits to family members, spend time reading about changes and following through on new behavior.

This is another area where green living is like karaoke. The end result is an excellent performance that gets the audience moving and grooving and the work can take on a lot of facets. In your life as a whole, or even with your home, there are just as many moving parts that work together in different ways.

While people might see if your siding has taken damage or your roof appears to be sagging, they won’t see a tiny leak that’s beginning to moisten a roof joist. Also, they won’t see if the siding wasn’t adequately secured to minimize heat loss to make the home more energy efficient. While they might smell something musty coming from a closet or a basement, they will probably not see if there’s a rusting pipe that is bleaching toxins into the environment. These are things that the sustainable homeowner alone has to live with, and whether or not all of these are worth fixing as they come up. Over time, this can get rather exhausting.

As time goes on, you have to make some choices to make your home more sustainable. With karaoke, one significant difference is that it’s extremely rare that even the best performer is going to make a go of taking things on the road and being a professional performer. But then, when you’re an eco-friendly homeowner, it’s a sort of profession, and you’re substantially monetarily connected to your home in ways that might not initially be well-known to an outsider. These ways can begin to take a toll on your life as a whole, and this can contribute to more problems than your home ends up solving for you.

When Your Home Stops Being Worth the Hassle

Even in California, sometimes, being a homeowner isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. The pressures of maintaining the house on the inside and the outside, the expenses that come along with all of this maintenance, the property taxes, and just the stresses of it all can come down on you. It’s rather like trying to be a musician, where the great times are wonderful moments, but the bad times are this quiet set of challenges that are always lurking in the background and waiting to strike at you when you least expect them to.

Sometimes, a person decides that their home is simply not worth it to them anymore. When this happens, It makes sense that they will generally sell the place. Some people flirt with renting it out, but this requires an entirely new set of skills that one must update within themselves. The skillset of being a homeowner remains, and then there’s the issue of tenants. Simply selling the place is a lot like simply walking off of the stage. You get away from the entire thing, and your life, at least in theory, gets just that much easier as a result.

The Easiest of the Easy Processes

Now, often, when a person goes to sell their home, they have a host of problems that crop up. Inspectors find all of the issues, and mortgage companies can be relentless even in highly sought-after areas. When you’re willing to make repairs and wait around for a month after month while the wheels slowly turn, this is perfectly acceptable. However, when you’re looking for the possibility of selling a house in poor condition, even if “poor” means “less than perfect but still pretty great,” you can still get a fair amount of money but without all of the trials and tribulations.

Make Eco-Friendly Homeownership a Priority

Sustainable homeownership is like being a great karaoke singer. You need to put a lot of work into embracing an eco-friendly lifestyle.