Powering Down with My Pals

At first, I didn’t think I would be able to relate much with others doing the sustainable behavior challenge. I felt like my struggles and my situation were unique. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see how similar other people’s experiences were to mine.

One similarity I found was that other people needed reminders to reduce their energy use as well. Though they did it in different ways, for example, setting a reminder in their phone, we both had to focus on remember to do the behavior we chose. I was also introduced to people trying to invest in tools to help change their behavior. Like me, one person was considering purchasing and installing a power strip to make it easier to power down.

However, I read about someone who faced a problem I have not. I took for granted that my roommate has helped me in changing my behavior, and I didn’t have another person being a barrier to my behavior change. If I had to worry about other people getting in the way of me reducing my energy use, it probably would have been much more difficult.

Having a community of people dealing with the same problems and experiences I have been dealing with has been incredibly encouraging. Receiving comments on my blogs cheering me on made me feel even more excited about reducing my energy use. Also seeing how other people were dealing with the same struggles I was having gave me new ideas for solutions that would make my experience easier.

However, most of all, creating a community made me hopeful for the future. I realized that if my entire community was able to make a change and reduce our energy use, we could probably get more people to join us. Maybe individually my actions couldn’t make a huge impact on the environment, but if I got my community to spread our message of reducing energy use, big things could happen. This revelation further inclined me to power down and unplug.