Steem at 45p? Rude not to

I'd been steadily buying from May through to August when I exhausted the budget I'd set aside from my savings for steem. I've noticed that the price drops every time I've bought some, but I try not to take it personally and just stick to my plans :D.

I did set up a business plan when I started on steem back in July 2017 and had started to put aside small amounts of money to invest in this new extension of my activities. I wasn't expecting to make a lot of money or even to have much of an audience, certainly not in the first two years or so. Initially, it was much more about learning how it all worked. That took some doing, both the technical aspects and the social side of it.

Along the way some interesting things happened, which I'll write about in another post, suffice to say here that coming on to steem and being exposed to the people and communities here had a transformative effect on my life that I hadn't anticipated. It began to offer more than maybe I would become skilled in the social and economic implications of a new(-ish) technology and maybe even earn some small part-time income from it.

It took me longer to learn how to buy steem, but eventually I did and started to buy regularly. At first, I thought it was going to take me a long time to reach dolphin status and then the price dropped again and it suddenly came in reach. The original budget was exhausted, but for not very much more I could reach the dolphin threshold. I still had day-to-day savings in my account.

I say savings, but the funds were earning exactly no interest in that particular account and I was paying £5 or £6 a month bank charges. There were other options, of course - long-term savings, ISAs, even my pension plan. I have already made some provision for those and there has to be some balance between saving for a future which may not happen and quality of life in the present. (Is this rationalising developing a gambling addiction)?

Anyway, I bought some more steem then, became a dolphin, realised there were other things I wanted to do, and bought some more. Then I settled into a plateau. Steem wasn't doing it for me any more, I wasn't getting the same pleasure from either writing or from engaging with other people. Like many of us, I had "stuff" going on in my life (and which, far from resolving, has grown exponentially, as stuff seems to do sometimes) which coloured how I was feeling.

But the other big issue was feeling that I had to, and was attempting to, blog every day rather than the two to four times a week I had been doing. Suddenly everything became work, another pressure, and I really went down in the doldrums. My own fault entirely, I'm forever saying to other people, do what you want to do.

One of the factors in this was the introduction of ranks on @actifit. I'd been cruising along, enjoying posting two, three, four times a week, pleased to be tracking activity in a low-key, helpful way and enjoying getting a fat vote for it. When ranks were introduced, one of the elements in the calculation was recent activity. I got some even bigger votes, thanks, I think, to the delegation to @actifit. But this ranks thing became relentless.

In the first few days it was great to see older women like @mariannewest and myself (yes me, the woman who hadn't run for decades and was more likely to be seen with a book and a glass of red wine than anything in lycra) heading the ranks. It really changed the dynamic and gave a message that being active is for everyone not just young fit strong people. But I was also caught up in the challenges of self-tracking. I even experienced that frustration and rage when you've done 12,000 steps and you can't publish your flipping post because of some dastardly technical glitch grrr.

So along came life big-time and put a stop to all that. A family member had been ill for a little while and I was needed, my attention needed to be elsewhere. I wasn't sorry, it was relief to get away from steem and all its challenges. And it provided some time to think about what I was doing and how had I become jaded and disinterested. What was I even doing on steem, should I just sink into a coma and come back ... later ...? I even thought of starting a new account free of all the baggage I seemed to have acquired (I'm laughing as I'm writing that - having to develop a plan to abandon self acquired baggage as if you couldn't just check it in, anyway).

I'd been watching the price and wondering whether to buy any more. It was going so low, it seemed rude not to. If we were talking about quality of life (rather than essentials or prudence), my favourite bottle of wine would buy 15.5 steem, a coffee in a mainstream coffee shop 6.7 steem, a snickers bar 1.75 steem (or 2.2 steem if you went for the two bars for £1 option) or 6.4 steem for the Saturday edition of my favourite newspaper.

This little set of Denby oddments, picked up from my local Oxfam shop (browsing charity shops is a favourite Saturday pastime) cost the same as 15.9 steem and the books I bought earlier this week would be 42 steem.

Into all this horrible mess came Steemfest. It was a great experience. I fulfilled my mission for work (which had paid for me and a colleague to be there), soaked up all that is steem, met many glorious people, some new, some I have known online for some time. But that mix of energy, people travelling such a long way to be together, the chance for social chats as well as the organised presentations and discussions. Amazing, re-vitalising and re-orienting.

Being only half a gambler, I waited until I got home and checked my accounts before buying any more steem. I did buy some that will take me to 6,000SP by the end of the month and some to invest in more steem basic income shares. This last allows me to do two things - get a steady return when I post and helps to provide an income for the community accounts I support. But more about the latter in another post.

I'm still decompressing after Steemfest: I feel clearer about steem, in the sense that I am in the right place, and I'm still thinking about what I want for me. I might take some time off work for that.

And this time, the price of steem went up after I bought some ;)

PS: thanks to @roelandp and his team for steemfest, it was a really great feat of organising and done so well.