of the 300+ people that were at the steemfest this year I knew a cross section of people there that I would never actually go up too because of a number of reasons you only realise when you are presented face to face with people, this is my opinion and reality of the situation, yours may differ but I feel I need to make sure this is out there because it’s important that I share my obvious own dysfunction so that maybe others have a voice too and make things easy for others to add their voice in too.

this blog post picture was taken by my wonderful (better half) @dayleeo, dayum this girl knows how to take a damn photograph. Love ya biza fizz.

I don’t see lots of people in real life

up until two weeks before steemfest I had pretty much weekly been on my own, some days not seeing another soul. It’s the life I had selected a little under a few years back now, in the field, on the grid and off - weekly I’d see my daughter for twenty four hours or so and I’d feel renewed and recharged with that positive energy — maybe I was just done with disruptive, desperate, consuming, aggressive energy of things that kept making me disconnect from the world. I don’t know but I knew things had to change — going to an event with this many ‘minds’ was overwhelming.

Many times in the day I was just simply overloaded. I couldn’t go and talk to another person instead just casting them a smile or a friendly look, I was still processing previous conversations from the night before, I did’nt have the brain drive space to start a new conversation with someone I follow but don’t actively comment on or talk too and I think that’s a really interesting thing about how the groupings of familiar people worked. You could see where the people safety zones were for people — who their people were, who they could energy vibe off and what was too deep or too beneath them (for whatever reason) in those situations I don’t force anything, it’s a feeling vibe anyway for those that are self aware like that.

many are there to expand their online audience

But not at the expense of real connections, I’ve been through too many social networks to know that the sum of your following and followers means absolutely nothing if you don’t have real, engaged people you can bump into at any time and vibe with — take @lloyddavis for instance, he found me at the opening party and it was like my long lost brother had appeared out of thin air — compassion travels across analogue and digital when it’s authentic, I have genuine compassion for this man, his views and his strengths, especially when it comes to quitting drinks and the journey in life that set him on his way to end up with a wonderful wife and new life in a new city.

I saw people that I knew online but not well enough to start up a conversation with, most of the time I just wanted to shake their hand or tap them on the back just because I was pleased for them as human beings, that they genuinely loved what they did, who they were, what they were doing, where they were going in life — I wasn’t judgemental of their life story and I knew our connection might be only very weak in terms of what a real life friendship means today anyway, we are literally data streaming across networks of data pinging and notifying at certain times of the day anyway, so why force it?

I will avoid vanity and projection of ego at all costs

I was dishearten with myself many times for not breaking my views on some of the people I would have liked to have a good conversation with. i remember in the last decade a different version of myself that felt that I deserved to be front of centre, I worked on it and I’m still working on it, to be more humble, reserved maybe, pacing myself, considering and thinking before being vocal and saying what I want to say rather than being reactionary, I wanted to listen more, ask, but listen to people more and I certainly got that from steemfest.

Many times I had to question my own ego and behaviour around people that made me feel like I had a faulty life firewall with the way they expected the environment to change for them, the idea of vanity and elitist gathers hit me many times as I watched in numerous times a kinda of visual instagram moment happen where I felt that people were ‘designing’ the way they wanted to be perceived by the audience because it would make a good post or create a good image version of them - like real time hacking of projecting a false narrative. It’s did’nt upset me or annoy me, but it did give me an insight into the social media entry point playing field and how we might be replacing legacy of doing with a legacy of illusion — again, I’m a bloke of 44 years of age and a little long in the tooth — I’m absolutely certain they all have good hearts at their core even if my personal aura matrix was sending out alerts of overload overload.

context is everything, this post is no different

Remember then, I don’t socialise, I’m very fragmented from the general population, I’m very much in poverty line, survival mindset and I’ve just had my partner arrive for another six month stint here in the uk and all the worry and anxiety that brought about if she would be sent home because of the way it looks to the ‘system’ when she stays for any length of time — if she came over every two weeks at a time then the system would have no problem but because it’s a ‘long time’ for the system she’s obviously here to fleece money out of the system and get free healthcare. Erm, no.

So you see I’m already starting to see that our decentralised living, the way we work online, the way we earn the money to feed and house ourselves is changing rapidly everyday, the system can’t keep up and it’s start to debilitate our movement, those borders are slowly creeping in everywhere, I’ve always said that each country would have a firewall like china, maybe that’s gonna end up being a social one, I know right now it’s a shit storm to explain to our uk border our intentions without having a marriage license.

Going to steemfest for me was a few things — I wanted to see the whites of the eyes of people, the nuances of the way they delivered their reasoning, listen to the wisdom of the crowd in terms of what they expected from the platform, when steem price was gonna up, a lot of people that I know are waiting for other people to do stuff for them, that they would never be ones to maintain or get stuck in but rather give or delegate for it to happen.

I saw a bunch of projects that I would love to in some way support and a bunch that I just simply wouldn’t because it was obvious to me it was a just a stab into the un-educated area of people that did’nt know how something worked but sounded better than what they had so must be true — we have a lot of this that happens in social media terms — a hype train of selling stuff that doesn’t work, will never work or where the startup will cash out in a few years time when they get bored or don’t get the attention they think they deserve, we have a long way to go to fix the issues of sharing the processes of our projects and why things can take so long to deploy.

the people I’m meant to meet

I don’t force it any more at events or conferences. I’m pretty seasoned to the whole conference thing. On the whole they are a scam, big ticket costs with self absorbed speakers, in my years as a brand advocate I’d only go if the digital agency paid for my ticket or covered the travel because the prices were crazy — I can honestly I had more value of interaction and engagement and felt ‘taken care of’ more than any other conference or event I’ve been to regarding digital anything.

Maybe it was the small grouping, the efficient buses and venues and food, always available food and what seemed like unlimited drinking — in some ways, I wish it was a retreat and not a festival around the things getting rolled out or made at steemfest, maybe we need another more social, build this less developer led set of gatherings because I would have been really happy to have eaten and drank and been more relaxed around a camp fire with these people instead! :)

In the end, I believe I met who I needed to meet. I saw people I would have connected with but really in my heart of hearts will never have that deep, years spanning connection with, many I felt were in transition themselves, I know I certainly am and am desperate to get out of this survival mindset so I can be a little more rested in my brain and useful, less chaotic, less frustrated with the way the world celebrates wasteful process and doesn’t jump at the chance to deploy all the wonderful world changing things make because of the way change is so seemingly difficult to accept en masse.

steem is just an entry point not a solution

Why is it that when we find part of a solution we assume it can do the rest so easily? That’s one of the things that I’m always taking away from people, even myself. I caught myself realising in the hackathon that even thou I had people coming up afterwards and saying it was a great idea it was not an important idea to where they were in their own life — we all have entry points to crypto and this decentralised approach to living our lives but we all come with different agendas and viewpoints, we need to pick away at the meat of the problem until it fits our own narrative and I can’t see how any company can adapt to that — so many voices, so little deployments.

I was introduced to steemit nine months ago by @lloyddavis he’s been a great friend, not just a digital connection or follower. A friend. He helped me financial, emotionally, even just a tweet many times along the decade or more we have known each other over many platforms. It’s real, it’s authentic, it’s an established period of time and we pretty much know what goes on in our lives — he knew that my voice or listening to the voices here would aid or enable my life from being here. that’s my entry point here. It’s an important one — those people I met at the even, those were important entry points to future meetings, not throw away but formative to hopefully future friendships. Like nodes in a network, self healing, self repairing hopefully.

I have regrets, sure.

Simply I did’nt get around to everyone, I did’nt take selfies with people I did’nt know so I could at least get to know them there, my own dysfunction meant that I kept away from some that I did’nt have anything to say something too, I’m not going to make an awkward situation more awkward by making a fool of myself and changing my upward energy mood at these style of events.

Context to me is important, I’m in flux, I’m aware of that, I’m maybe let the universe take the lead a little too much — maybe I’m just not able to keep that ever growing extensive list of people in my head right now I don’t know — maybe over the next year I’ll read more people, more people will comment here, maybe I’ll have more video one to one with them and see what they are doing, or maybe I won’t — and I have to be ok with that too because we live fast now, we adapt faster, we flow in and out of networks depending on different factors and it’s getting faster.

One reason was my own mental health, I didn’t want to engage in anything were I would feel insincere to the feeling that someone was going through, when you are going through something yourself it’s hard to be there for others, that’s how I felt a lot of the time. I did’nt want my first conversation with a fresh human being to be one with all my emotional discourse flowing out of my mouth ruining their day, maybe that’s why as a remote viewer people might be convinced that ‘everyone is in on it’ and that it was impossible for people to be this happen. Maybe we were just filtering better than the current steemit.com website can, let’s be honest, it needs better filtering! :)

in conclusion

I tried to be vocal to those people that were in attendance even when I knew we had absolutely fuck all in common. I tried to respect the space of others and I certainly tried to listen more. I saw myself in a lot of you and I knew you saw a lot of our characters inside of each other. It was super humbling and led me back to believe that we have some good people in the world that want things to be right — I saw a lot of people that were in it for themselves only too. But what is that anyway. Who am I to judge for that? Maybe they thought that about me due to our decentralised nature of what friendship means to each other these days anyway. I have no answers for that, I go very much on the nuances of the moment.

this event was probably the best thing that I will attend in this year, 2017 on planet earth, for the rest of the year I’ve been alone on my own with patches of seeing my daughter every weekend and my partner online or via video every day or every other day, I often feel like I’m already living in the future where nobody goes out anymore and everyone is plugged into the matrix with VR headsets and nobody touches anyone physically anymore, I can see that being a potential payout of the way that humans could end up and I absolutely hate that idea — to have share moments tactical around other humans full of positivity thoughts (even negative but valid ones) was something that I really needed and a real tough cookie to keep pleased!

Steemit has become my new yellow post it note in recent months, yes, the financial incentives are a big plus for me having often so little and this morning steem bought me a new tyre inflator and a battery charger to get my car (transport) going again, without it I would have had to walk to get my daughter from school on friday and hey maybe I need to make that a thing so she understands that life is difficult and not full of rainbows too but for this week I’m gonna be driving — and that’s for people like you, reading, taking part, giving a shit and sharing our stories that make the analog world rotate around a little more today.

Thanks for reading.
Lots of Positive Compassion.
Phil, TeamHumble x