Two Hours on the Listings App and Nothing to Show for It

It starts innocently. You are waiting for the rice to boil and you open the property app, just to see what is around. A three-bedroom in Mandeville with a view. A townhouse near the school. A house in Florida with a pool, which you could never afford, but it does no harm to look. Then a video tour. Then a design account showing how someone turned a plain concrete box into something out of a magazine. Then another listing.

The rice is burnt. It is two hours later. You have seen perhaps sixty houses, and you feel worse about your own than when you started.

Browsing that feels like planning

The trouble with listings and home design feeds is that they feel productive. You are researching. You are learning what things cost. You are getting ideas. And sometimes that is true. People do find their home this way, and good ideas do come from other people’s kitchens.

But much of the time the scrolling has no destination. There is no budget in mind, no area chosen, no decision coming up. It is simply wandering, and the apps are built to keep us wandering. Each swipe offers a little lift: a nicer house, a better view, a kitchen with the island you always wanted. The lift fades quickly, and so we swipe again.

Cisterns that hold no water

The prophet Jeremiah describes God’s people drifting away in a vivid image. “They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13, NKJV).

For anyone who has lived with a water tank, that picture lands. A cracked cistern takes a great deal of effort to dig and fill, and then it quietly lets everything seep away. You keep hauling water to it and it keeps being empty.

Endless browsing for a better house can work like that. It promises satisfaction and delivers a brief sip, followed by a deeper thirst. Few people would call it idolatry. But it can slowly shift where we look for contentment, away from the God who provides and towards the next listing.

What it does to the house you already have

Consider a couple who have lived for ten years in a perfectly decent two-bedroom house. The roof is sound, the yard has a lime tree, the neighbours are kind. Neither of them had given much thought to the size of the kitchen until they started following a few design accounts. Now, every evening, one of them says something about the counters, the old louvres or the lack of an en-suite. Nothing has changed about the house. What has changed is the comparison running constantly in the background.

Or think of a single woman renting in Toronto who has been saving for years towards a place in Jamaica. She spends her evenings looking at houses she cannot yet buy, in towns she has not visited, and finds herself increasingly anxious that prices are running away from her. The browsing has not moved her closer to buying. It has only made the waiting harder.

Browsing with a purpose

None of this means deleting every app. It means knowing why you have opened it. Some habits that help:

• Search with filters set. If you are genuinely looking, decide the area, the maximum price and the must-haves first. Look only at what fits.
• Set a time. Twenty minutes on a Saturday morning with a notebook is research. Two hours at midnight is usually not.
• Notice how you feel afterwards. If you close the app feeling restless or resentful, that is useful information.
• Save ideas, not envy. When a design idea is genuinely useful, a cheap shelving trick or a way to catch breeze, save it and move on. You do not need to see forty more.
• Look up from the screen. Walk round your own house or yard and notice what is good about it. Say it out loud to someone.

Back to the fountain

Jesus stood up at a feast in Jerusalem and called out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink” (John 7:37). The invitation is to a source that does not run dry, which is exactly what a feed of houses cannot offer.

There is nothing wrong with wanting a better home, and nothing wrong with planning for one. The question is whether our looking is taking us somewhere, or simply carrying us along. A few minutes of honest prayer about what we really need will often do more for our contentment, and for our house-hunting, than another evening of scrolling.

Follow Jamaica Homes on Youtube @jamaicahomes and Instagram @jamaica_homes and on Facebook @jamaicahomesnews Send us a message or email us at onlinefeedback@jamaica-homes.com or editor@jamaica-homes.com