Recently, I met a friend (the same whose summer cottage I went with just recently), and we chatted about a lot of things. We're both young adults now and starting to clear a path for ourselves. He studies in a university, focusing on natural sciences, one day becoming a graduate engineer, if everything goes by the plan. Me on the other hand... well, I do... stuff. You know, things.
It's always been as so that I try different things and am always a bit here and there, and I don't really have any idea where I'm going. And, this is mostly perceived as a bad thing or, well, a concerning sign – people who don't continue with school are in much bigger danger to get marginalized, statistically speaking.
I don't have a job right now, nor am I studying at the moment – technically the closest thing I would be, is "unemployed". Quotation marks, because I don't really associate myself with that batch of identity.
I could lie and say I'm on a "gab year", because I do not think I am going to school. Of course, some people would want me to, like my grandparents. I'm already thinking some deception strategies on how to get their thoughts from school to... something else, because I'm getting bit tired of them "roasting me" by trying to give suggestions of what I should study or what I should become. "You like this, perhaps profession X?" "Profession Y has a lots of jobs." I think I'm going to tell about the Poland trip and my means of getting there: hitchhiking. That should give them enough worries, because they will probably be afraid of me dying, so that they won't ask what I'm going to do for the winter, because I don't know.
Anyhow, my friend knows that I'm quite invested here on Steem, that I write here, and try to understand this whole thing. Emphasis on trying, because when I'm explaining this stuff to an outsider, it really challenges me too, and it forces me to think more in depth about some important questions. What is this place? What are we trying to do here? What am I doing here?
All I can really manage to say for certain, is "it is something never done before, and therefore it's also a huge work in progress".
Progress. It has become apparent to me, increasingly so, that this place is far from ready. We are still on the very early steps; the Netcoins voting has proved that there's only really a core group of few thousand members of active and involved members. However, those few thousand might be much more committed and interested in the future of Steem than in any other crypto. Of course, I am heavily biased, but Steem is the only crypto that has drawn me in and actually gotten interested on the process.
Other crypto "communities" might have thousands, perhaps even millions of members on paper (read: followers on social media), but I would bet that the percentage of folks really giving a fuck about their development at the intensity similar to Steem, is way less than what we have here.
And what I think is quite remarkable here, is that the amount of non-technical minded people involved in the process, one way or the other, is way more than in any other crypto, I would argue.
We, truly involved, might be few and scarce, but I would say we have one of the most diverse community in any cryptocurrency ever; photographers, artists, travelers, writers, developers, coders, economists – people from every street of life. But what ties many of us at this point, who have survived this far through all emotional (and financial) roller coaster, is that we all want Steem to work out, and we are quite committed to do that.
Yes, we all have dollar signs in mind, but that's not all, because some of us are crazy enough to invest heavily, not only their money, but their time too – something you can never get back – into this place. Why hasn't any other crypto attracted you so much, why aren't you spending hours on Ethereum or Litecoin forums and thinking of ways how it could change the world?
Steem is exceptional in its social nature that it makes possible to utilize the perspective of a wide range of individuals who aren't just tech-oriented geeks.
It might seem like it's all a big mess with every one having their own view on every single detail from the distribution of reward pool, curation rewards, user retention, bid bots and so on. But I see that only as a good thing, because the diversity of opinions will actually improve decision making. This claim might seem upside down at first, but think about the other extreme where everyone agrees with each other – that would raise a bigger alarm bell in my head, because it would be a sign of having been driven to "group thinking" where disagreeing on something would come with the price of being excluded from the group. "You must agree with us, or else..."
That's exactly the reason why there are so many decisions made that seem unbelievable stupid, and we don't want that happening here in Steem, am I right?
Now, it happened again, that I ended up with a completely another thing than I intended, and many times something good actually comes out of it still, even though I have no idea where I'm going.
Probably the only time when I decided to listen someone, was at school when I was discussing my math studies with my guidance counselor – I had a feeling that I should revert into the short syllabus instead of continuing the long one. She convinced me to stick to it, I was 5 or 6 coursers in already after all – half way through – not to forget all the "future study paths it opens".
Soon I realized that listening my counselors assurances was a mistake; most of the remaining coursers were complete flops (somehow I still got through them, except the last one: integration) where I didn't really care at all about the substance, and on matriculation exams I wrote a lubenter approbatur, (B for short, we use fancy latin names for some reason) in other words, the third worst grade, below the average result.
I guess what I'm trying to say, is that I need to find my own place in the world that I'm living in, myself. I appreciate all the effort from people trying come up with solutions, but the problem is that rarely do I get any advice or perspective that would actually help me in the process itself. Because the process for me seems to not work like grocery shopping: pick what you want ready from the shelf.
All this is also part of me trying to figure my place here on Steem, too. Perhaps there is none set in stone, because this place is in a constant change. Perhaps that's exactly why I like it here so much, because right now in it's infancy, focusing only on a niche might not provide enough reward and therefore having a broad range of interests might actually prove to be useful, who knows.
