If your first few weeks on Steemit have been anything like mine, it's been an emotional rollercoaster. From my initial curiosity and the thrill of getting my first payout, to my frustration at seeing some of my best posts ignored and my incredulity at seeing a makeup tutorial make over $30 000, I've had a wild ride so far.

Based on my observations, it seems like a lot of us are having a similarly volatile experience. As a psychology graduate, I’ve come up with a kind of theory about the shared experience we’re all going through. Lie down on the couch and let’s talk about it, shall we?

Stage 1: Curiosity

Upon encountering Steemit, we find ourselves immediately intrigued. “You mean I can make money just by writing things on the internet?” we say, “Surely this is too good to be true!” But a little investigation proves that people are making money - and a lot of it. The way they’re making this money is also interesting, and quite different to anything else we know about. So we sign up and decide to try our hand at a few posts of our own. How hard can it be?

Stage 2: Excitement

Then it happens. One of our posts gets some high-power upvotes and makes a couple hundred or even a couple thousand dollars. Money rains from the sky, seemingly out of nowhere. We feel incredibly elated, and immediately decide this is the next big thing. We tell all our friends, maybe we even start planning what we’re going to buy with our new-found fortune. Whatever the case, after a brief celebration/happy dance, we immediately start working on our next award-winning piece, already hooked and eager to make some more money.

Stage 3: Overconfidence

Believing we have already cracked the Steemit code, we rapidly write three more pieces in the same style as our big winner, perhaps even on the same topic. Creativity flows like wine (perhaps a little wine flows as well), we’re writing a mile a minute, and we’re certain it’s going to be a smash hit. We’ve already arrived at a rough (read: vastly inflated) estimate of how much this one’s going to make, and can hardly wait to hit the post button and share our masterpiece with our adoring audience. We scoff at the majority of posts currently on the trending page, believing ours to be far superior in every way. It’s only a matter of time before @steemed puts us on his magic list now!

Stage 4: Disappointment and denial

We sit hitting the refresh button for two hours after posting, getting more despondent by the minute as its meager upvotes dwindle and slowly stop. We can’t believe it. “Why do they not recognize my genius?” we ask, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth. We decide it must be because we posted at the wrong time, when the benevolent @berniesanders was out to lunch, or perhaps that topic has simply had its day. Maybe there was even a glitch in the system that accidentally buried our post. It certainly isn’t because our writing needs work!

Stage 5: Frustration and bargaining

Our next post takes hours, maybe even days to write. We spend time reading all the how-to guides we can find and engineer our post to check all the boxes. It’s the most perfect Steemit post ever created by man. We nervously tell ourselves that if a half-assed post about tits ’n’ travel can make it big, this well-crafted piece of intellectual writing surely must. We post and wait, quietly biting our nails.

It fails. We rage. “What is this bullshit?!” we cry, shaking a fist at the abstract injustice of the internet. We immediately decide that Steemit is a world of foolishness where the rich get richer and the poor continue to see their efforts go unrewarded, and swear off it entirely. Maybe half an hour later, we come crawling back, making a deal with ourselves that if just one of our next five, ten, twenty posts makes some money, it’s totally worth it, right?

Stage 6: Grim resolve

Thirty long, intricately written posts later, we’ve made a grand total of $12.32. We’re surrounded by cups of half-drunk beverages and forgotten pieces of toast, and our hair has become somewhat disheveled. With the blank, slightly twitchy expression of the vaguely insane, we doggedly begin yet another post. We’re too far in to give up now. The potential rewards are just too great. Maybe @dan is watching right now? We’re so close to figuring it all out, god dammit. JUST GIVE ME $100 AND I’LL BE HAPPY!

Stage 7: Exhaustion

We break. All excuses fail. We’ve wasted endless hours of potentially productive time and received the price of a small meal in return. Enough is enough. Wiping one final tear from our weary eye, we tear ourselves away from the screen and pretend to get on with our lives. With a sigh, we consign the idea of becoming a Steemillionaire overnight to our pile of other broken dreams and fruitless ambitions. With one last jealous look at all those smug fuckers at the top of the earnings list, we close it for good.

Stage 8: Acceptance

After a period of inactivity, during which we try not to think about Steemit and the many happy inhabitants of the trending page, we wake up in the middle of the night with a truly original idea, one that had been lurking in the background all along but needed some thoughtspace to break through. Tentatively, we decide it’s worth a shot, but instead of rushing to bash it out as quickly as possible, we write it down, and work on it in our spare time over the next few days. It’s a longer process, but worth it - the writing feels better, more authentic, more well-composed. For the first time, we’re actually proud of our work.

Through this process, we realize that Steemit isn’t so bad after all - it’s our approach to it that matters. We decide to treat it like a part-time job or a hobby, and give it some time without taking it too seriously. We also spend a bit more time reading and interacting with others’ posts, finding a whole new side to Steemit we hadn’t noticed before when we were so busy trying to make a quick buck for ourselves. Just as we’re about to click the post button, we notice to our great surprise that the anxiety that was attached to this action before is gone!

We post happily, knowing that we’re contributing something valuable to the community, and hope for the best.