How do I cope when good energy advice loses to upfront cost?

You can read any building's energy use. And you are tired, tired of watching solid recommendations get shot down because the upfront cost scares people, even when the long-term math is clearly in their favor. That frustration is the ache of someone who can see what others will not. Here is the hard, freeing truth: you control the quality of your advice, not the choice people make with it. Some will always pick the cheap now over the wise later, and that is theirs to own. Your job is to make the case as clearly and honestly as you can, in their language, and then let the decision go. Carrying their bad choices home only wears you out. Try shifting how you frame it, not the science, but the story: show the cost of doing nothing, the payback in months, the money leaking every year they wait. Some will still say no. But you will have done your part fully, and you can set down the rest. You are the advisor, not the decider, and that boundary is what keeps this work from grinding you down.