I left Steem for 4 months and I'm not even sure why

in #diary5 years ago (edited)

Soo, I've been gone for 4 months while I really wanted to post, to come back, almost every day. I don't know why I did it. I felt some strange pressure leading me away. I enjoy it here, I like the people, I like writing, I like throwing votes around. But then what happened? I don't know. Sometimes I figure things out as I write, so maybe we can find out together.

I played online games every day since I left. They were my escape, where I hid from the feeling of guilt of not doing the things I like or the things I must do. The things I like include Steem, and as Steem was my main earning last year, I'd say it's also a thing I must do. But I also hid from going to the doctor, simply didn't do it, and my mum had to make the appointments many months late for me to finally get my regular check. I still haven't done any of the exams I was told to a month ago. (Mental note to force myself sometime soon in the future)

As I played the games, at first, I told myself I was looking for inspiration, and then I just slowly became a bit addicted, as all good games "should" get their users. Maybe it was that, maybe I was just scammed out of my time by a few witty game developers. Or maybe there was a deeper reason to why I left.

I had already been feeling a bit down. I'm one of the sad bunch that doesn't like to work too much to get money, but ends up working doubly when ends need to be met and the savings for the "future" are gone. Maybe that was that. Maybe this was my regular burning up, my regular bi-yearly vacation near April that simply pushes a hurricane around me and blows everything away but the calm of the eye, the comfort zone. And then I try to leave the comfort zone again until two years later it hits me again? Maybe it's that, maybe I just drive too intensely up the slope and need to fix my engine for a few months.

I can't deny that I did crazy progress by saving so much money while strictly doing only unconventional things such as writing for the blockchain and programming bots. Clearly it wasn't enough though, and maybe that's the problem. I've realized that Steem and programming bots is not the most profitable activity ever. I can live off of it but it's not enough to move out, pay a plane ticket, rent in a new country, studies and new-life expenses. Maybe that's what depresses me: the knowledge that even though I really love this, it's not affordable to do it full-time, and that even though this brings in money, it's such a small edge that I need to optimize and keep adding eternally, in a get-rich game that only lets you fill your pockets with spare change.

Yeah, I think that's pretty close to the truth. Jackpot! Bingo! Victory Royale! Now I know that I'm just so "greedy" that I prefer nothing to bare living standards. It's like going on a hunger strike to protest unjust salaries, except you're self-employed, and you set the salary yourself when you picked this line of work, and nobody cares, and you die from hunger. Whoops. Also, strikes need activism, I was just playing games, so it was more like I got tired of being so lazy that I wasn't earning enough, and I decided that I was going to solve my insatisfaction by being even lazier and playing games for 4 months straight. Pat on the back, that was real smart.

Moving forward, what are the plans for the future? Well, the Sharon-brand continues, we're shipping nuclear missiles to China in unmarked fishing boats. I'm planning a few tragedies worldwide. Prepare your bunker because we're going on a radiation tour across the whole world, consider hunger and slavery over because they will all be dead by New Year's Eve. What a gift, world peace, ending hunger and suffering.

Now seriously, what am I doing now? I plan on coming back. I've been setting the stage. I found a nice weekly planning app with hour slots. I set some activities for today! I didn't do any of them, but that's a start, at least I planned the day? I really need some help to get productive. I have a new character for my fiction series. I've been developing her, finding some nice things, and I believe that she'll be ready next week for launch. Don't expect the, because I'm not very reliable when it comes to continuing worlds and characters, but don't be surprised if a few stories pop up next week. I've been collecting illustrations, lore and other funny bits of interest.

In other news, I was invited to play DnD on an online chat of friends. That's a first. I've never played it but I've always been interested. I don't know how the experience will be. They all love me and treat me well, but somehow I think I'm not the best fit in that group, or any group, because my mind is a bit dark and strange. We'll see. I'll try to remember to come back after the fact and write down my experience with it.

If anyone reads this, what do you do for productivity? How do you get motivated to actually follow the productivity steps instead of just avoiding them? I'm a chronic avoider of duties, so I need a big power surge to be able to turn this around.


Image taken from Pixabay

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Um, awesome to meet you. So much of what you say rings with familiarity to me. Games and relaxing that isn't relaxing because it's driven by malaise. I once played Civilization so much that, when I burned a burrito, for an instant, I thought I could reload from my last save and not burn it in the replay.

I expect D&d will help. Doing things with other people has helped me. Maybe come by @freewritehouse and join us for some funspiration. I made that up just now. Good word?

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Hey! Awesome to meet you too :D

I know that feeling, but I'm good at not feeling it. I'm in fact terrible at feeling guilt, to the point that people sometimes hate my indifference. It's not the best trait to have socially but it makes me emotionally stable most of the time.

I've played Civ 5, and it was so slow! I played it for a week, but every game ran for hours and hours, and it got to a point where each turn lasted at least 5 minutes. The matches were so time-intensive that I had to leave the game because it was giving me anxiety just waiting for my next turn haha.

I haven't done social things like that before. Have you played it? I'll take your word for it and look forward a bit more anxiously till the day comes when we're to play.

I used to go there, to Freewrite, and then I started getting anxiety about that too, because I felt that my writings were too short, and too general, and that I wasn't "respecting" my readers by doing long and serious writing, but instead just moving my fingers around for 5 minutes and hitting post every day to farm their daily vote. At the same time, they used to get more attention than my normal posts hahaha, so maybe they aren't so terrible. I'll give it a go. I need some funspiration anyway, nice word :3

On the topic of my post, can I ask what you do for a living, and what you do to keep up doing it without falling to the temptation of simply quitting when things get a bit hard/slow?

Yes and yes.

Firstly to your worries about doing freewriting disrespectfully: never fear! I love reading whatever, and nonsense and/or short writings are as fulfilling to me as anything! It's not farming, it's participating in the community exercise. If all you want to do is move your fingers around and hit post, great! If you find yourself drawn to reading and commenting on others, great! It's here for how it's useful to you as much or as little as you want it to be. Anxiety needn't rear its head. Not that we can always control our emotions about that. I know on Steem there's a lot of finger-waving about what you should and shouldn't do, but @freewritehouse aims to alleviate any of that stress as far as we're concerned.

What I do for a living is acting, and things are almost always slow and hard. I get an audition once in a blue moon. I guess I have a lot of tangential things related to my work that aren't my work that keep me going. Like, I perform improv weekly. And I read to kids in a school. But I also give into the temptation to just not do anything for my career on plenty of days. It's hard. It's, like really really hard. Not the working, but the not-working, you know? When I have work everything that was hard is easier, though of course there are things that are hard about the work itself, but they're fulfilling. What isn't fulfilling is the stuff that I'm maybe supposed to do in between the working. Trying to network or revise my resume or get new photos or find a class or or or. And, to keep myself from becoming miserable and giving up, I give myself permission to not do those things when I'm feeling overwhelmed by all the coulds and shoulds. It doesn't always work. And it might not be the right thing to do. But mostly it must, because I'm still in this business many years after starting, and though there have been many months between gigs occasionally, I'm still as eager as ever to work.

Oh, the biggest thing that keeps me sane is having friends outside the industry. Don't get me wrong, I love my actor friends. But we're all trying to do the same thing, and it's just nice to relax with people who don't get it and think that it's cool that I'm an actor. ;)

And yeah! D&D. And also, I never got into Civ 5. I played it a bit, but I keep going back to Civ 4. I've heard good things about Civ 6.

But yeah. Games take many hours. But that's what I love about them. I get consumed by it.

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Glad to see you back 👌

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Heyo, thanks for the warm welcome back 😊

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I did the same thing Sharon, the difference is that I spent most of my "steem-vacations" watching tv shows and movies, didn't play much because my gaming computer is fried...

Welcome back!

My gaming computer is about to get fried :( It's humming and buzzing. I need to clean it up and see what's wrong with it before it goes kaput. What were your favorite TV shows and movies?

Altered Carbon and The Expanse, I'm into sci fi... what about you, what games did you play?

Dofus, League of Legends, Minecraft and Tetris. Sadly the Tetris website was closed, I was bothered by someone in the Minecraft server, and League of Legends is not running as smoothly as before on my computer. I'm still playing Dofus but I'm trying to regulate the time I spend in-game in order to get my life back into order.

I've watched Altered Carbon, and I loved the series. I had been writing a world bearing some similarities before I watched it, so I was pleasantly surprised, if also a bit disappointed that my original ideas had been thought of before and been brought to the screen so recently.

I don't know The Expanse, so I'll check it out online.

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