Why is it that a houseplant living indoors is so sensitive to humidity, water hardness, watering schedule, sunlight… when the same plant has grown outdoors in wild conditions and thrives there?
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Plants growing in nature are adapted to live there. When you bring it indoors, you are removing all of the conditions that it required to thrive and that makes you now the provider of all of its needs. The biggest problem is you removed it from its soil and everything it interacted with beyond the pot size is now gone. Think how easy it is to live on earth (growing out in nature) vs how easy it is to live on Mars (growing in a pot in doors). We take it for granted that we have air to breathe water to drink and food to eat.
Likely you are only feeding the house plant a general chemical fertilizer meant for house plants. This is a serious problem. Your plant now needs that chemical food and for it to not accumulate in the small amount of soil that is in your pot or else it leads to a nutrient lockout. You will need to periodically flush the soil with plain water to attempt to reset the nutrient balance in the dirt. I now call it dirt because it is likely dead. What happens in nature is a whole microscopic world of fungi, bacteria, nematodes, protozoa, micro anthropods and then your earthworms and all the small critters in the soil that you can see perform a function called ‘nutrient cycling’. The bacteria and fungi eat raw mineral material from rock or what have you, the bacteria get eaten by the protozoa and nematodes, which get eaten by other and larger protozoa and nematodes, which get eaten by micro anthropods which get eaten by small little critters in the soil and then that continues all the way up the food chain to us. But what happens when bacteria get eaten by a predator, is most of the nutrients get expelled and that is what becomes ‘plant available nutrients’. This whole ‘soil food web’ is what feeds all plants in nature and why giant forests don’t need to be ‘fertilized’. Further more, plants create a relationship with the soil food web. Depending upon their nutrient requirements, from moment to moment, they will produce something called root exudates. Which is a type of sugar it gives to the soil which (through evolution) attracts the type of bacterial predator that will release the required nutrient within root reach of the plant. In essence the plant baits in what it needs. When you feed a plant chemical fertilizers, you short cut the need for the plant to produce these exudates and the plant will stop producing them, which collapses the soil food web. This is how soils turns to dirt. You no longer have a food providing system. This isn’t just a house plant problem. This is the most serious problem our society is facing. All industrial farms apply more, and more chemical fertilizers to try to keep taking care of the plants, but what is happening is the soil is getting more and more destroyed. It has been predicted that at our rate there is maybe 50 more years of soil left. The solution is to stop tilling (which collpses soil structure and leads to compaction), stop applying the chemical fertilizers and bring life back to the soil in the form of organic matter (compost) and compost tea (concentrated dose of bacteria and fungal predators. It takes time, but year after year, soil will improve with less and less interventions.
Sorry got off track and ended on a soap box
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