Just to add to Bill’s point with “the foundation is fine”
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Imagine the country is a nice older house, it is one of the newer houses in the neighborhood but it is still perfect.
It has a yard with a decent fence, might need a bit of fixing up so the neighbors dog doesn’t come in and tear up the garden.
It has pretty friendly neighbors, the type that will bring back your toaster after asking to borrow it.
And the inside is great! Lots of room, a few things need to be fixed up and refurbished, but all in all its a good house.
But after a good while of living in the house, suddenly you wake up and the whole thing has collapsed into a pile on the concrete.
You start thinking of how this could have happened. You have been working tirelessly to fix the roof, how could everything have collapsed?
The answer starts small, the foundation is perfectly fine, its been settling over the years and is stable, but you saw some cracks in the drywall; “no big deal, ill just patch those eventually.” But you let water get into the cracks, before you know it, the studs are rotting away in the walls, covered by a little damage, hiding how bad the problem is, next the roof supports are rotting, even the central support collumn is warped from the weight of the damage, all it took was for a little group of bugs to make their way in to bring everything down, all because we didn’t do our due diligence with the small problem.
Hope this made sense, I’ll explain in another post if it is asked for.
3 replies on “The House Analogy”
…and sometimes, even in the cleanest houses and best neighborhoods, you have a pest problem. Ants and cockroaches and other disgusting, invading, and grotesque creatures that come out of the smallest cracks in the foundation. No matter how much you try to fill the cracks they find their way back in with greater numbers. And you are weary and unnerved, constantly fighting to keep your house pest free. If you don’t stay diligent you lose more ground to the pests everyday. You can’t take it anymore. The constant assault. The tiring task of being on guard 24/7. You need a break. Take a vacation from the stress and try to ignore the fact that diligence is needed, just for a bit. Just until you regain your strength to pick up the fight again. But when you come back, stronger from the rest, you find the pests have overtaken the house and no matter how strong you are you are overwhelmed. Some of your closest family members jump ship and decide the house is in such disorder that it is no longer worth fighting for. You are more alone than ever and the battle is ever growing larger. At your wits end, you start hearing that others in your neighborhood are having the same problem and similarly disgusted with the pests. You find each other and realize that together, you can rise up and take back control of your house and eventually improve the whole neighborhood by attacking the pests at the source. Together.
Sounds like you were constantly choosing the lesser of two weevils.
Makes perfect sense.